Slashdot Mirror
The SEC and Fake Investment Sites
An anonymous reader sent in: "Our web-based challenge for the day: find the SEC's fake investment sites! The SEC claims to have seeded the web with fake investment sites in order to teach naive web users and investors about the dangers of believing all you read and investing without research. These sites have telltale signs of online investment fraud, and if people manage to overlook or ignore those issues and attempt to invest money, informs them that they have made an unwise decision. The SEC says that these sites are intended to encourage wise investing decisions, or in more casual terms, to attempt to slap fools upside the head with a cluestick before they lose their money in a real scam. It's an interesting use of the web by a government-related agency."
Sweet.
What a cool way to teach the less-informed among us not to trust everything just because it's on the web. Now, if we could get websites out there that ask for personal info to do the same, ie:
Enter your credit card info here:
XXXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXXX
No Idiot, this site is about my dog skippy, there is no need for you to hand this over. Now get off the web and find a clue. (Hint: your 10 year old child is more web-savvy than you)
Sent from your iPad.
http://www.enron.com/corp/
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Shouldn't be too hard to find.
Registrant:
SEC (MCWHORTLE-DOM)
6432 GENERAL GREEN WAY
ALEXANDRIA, VA 22312
US
Domain Name: MCWHORTLE.COM
Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
SEC (VMGSFHPWCO) webmaster@mcwhortle.com
SEC
6432 GENERAL GREEN WAY
ALEXANDRIA, VA 22312
US
202 824 5151 fax: 202 504 2477
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
On the other hand, though, it's kind of sad that there are people who actually invest in this kind of stuff. One would think that people would be (more) careful when there is real money involved. There are plenty of brokers out there, and while they may not give the *best* advice, they certainly wouldn't direct innocent people toward investments that are ovbiously scams. If you don't know what you're doing with your money, then take it to someone who does. If you don't, you're just asking for trouble.
On some level, people affected by these scams get what they have coming to them.
SEC Computers Catch Fire After During Hacker Attack
By Joe Snuffy
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, January 30, 2002; 2:45 P.M.
The SEC headquarters was evacuated today after a form of the denial of service hacking attack, commonly known as "slashdotting" caused their servers to halt and catch fire. The FBI refuses to confirm that it may be seeking one Rob "Commander Taco" Malda for questioning in this terrorist attack on America's financial structure.
Best Slashdot Co
http://www.gppf.org/events/oswindle.htm Shows the FTC doing the exact same thing and discussing it in the 1990's. Sheesh, stuff from 3-5 years ago isn't exactly new :-)
I love it. It is a great way to teach people not to trust everything they read on the net. And WhiteKnight, all the info is made up. The SEC made sure that you can't invest in the company or use the made up info to actually lose money. That was in the article.
We have often joked about doing something similar with viruses. Setting up a hotmail account and sending all the user in our department an attachment. The attachment would write to a log on our network and put up a dialog box that said something like "So you just ran a program from some joker on the internet. You've just lost all your work and your boss has been notified."
We haven't done it of course, but we dream.
Pre-IPO Investment Oversubscribed!
McWhortle Enterprises has had to stop accepting investors for Stage 1 of its Pre-IPO investment after the program was over-subscribed by nearly 200%. Because of the enormous demand, we will, for a very limited time, accept new investors into this program.
Darn it, I was all ready to sign up, but I guess the rest of the slashdot community got to it before me.
Funny, Bush didn't mention the increased funding for the War on Stupidity last night...
Just check Google for matching phrases! http://www.wemarket4u.net/prosperity/
The electric yellow has got me by the brain banana
Imagine getting paid by the SEC to make up stuff about a non-existent company. Where do I sign up?
Let the FBI put up sites for child porn, and the requirement for entry into the child porn is submitting your own child porn. Is this entrapment? What about the MPAA doing this with movie downloads?
Fight Spammers!
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission do a similar thing in print publications. They run
bogus investment ads, including Geep - the amazing Sheep/Goat hybrid and Jellyfish Farms. The numbers actually put you in contact with ASIC, who'll tell you to be more careful with your money.
I admit, these are a little easier to spot than the SEC ones...
|>
Here be Dragons
Here are the results of the domains owned by the SEC according to the whois database at network solutions:
WINDHANDEL.COM
SEC-CIVIL.COM
SECRECRUITMENT.COM
SEC-NL.COM
OPERATIONDESERTFOX.COM
DOUZALS.COM
SEC (SE463-ORG) no.valid.email@WORLDNIC.NET 619 487 7988
MCWHORTLE.COM
I submitted this on Monday (I mentioned it on my website) I was logged in, not anonymous. So much for logged in users taking precedence over anonymous users :-)
... excuse me ... reviews of media releases (DVDs) and movies that encourage free software enthusiasts to go out and put money in the pockets of an industry bent on hamstringing the internet and legislating free software (and the tools to make it) out of existence.
I quit submitting stories to slashdot years ago, when similar things would happen. The submission process is straightforward enough, but the editorial process is about as transparent as crude oil on a moonless night. Who knows why stories get rejected one day, resubmitted and accepted another, with the latecommer getting the credit. Who knows why a site which purports to be pro free software/open source/whatever dumps stories of technical interest in favor of promotions
I gave up trying to figure this out years ago, and now content myself to just reading whatever interesting stuff happens to make it through the filter, and posting an occasional diatribe or two.
I recommend anyone discontent with this sort of thing to do the same. It will entail much less frustration and heartache for you, and if enough people do it perhaps the editors will take the hint and become more fair in how they select stories and attribute them. In the meantime, life is too short, so don't let this sort of irritation get to you.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The ASIC - Australia's equivalent to the SEC - has been runnning bogus internet scams of their own for a while now. They even have awards for the best (or worst depending on your viewpoint) scams found - The Gull Awards (past winners)
Thats Gull as in Gullible.
*** I am the real stylewagon
Given that it's been reported on sites like CNN as well, pulling in rubberneckers who are techy and not, SEC is probably not counting on much beyond the curiosity factor with this particular site. Searchs by slashdotters may through off stats on other sites today, but that's probably an expected outlier as well--we are not the only ones to like challenges, and announcing that you've got sites like this out there is tantamount to declaring a challenge.
Immediate "news-worthy" benefits had already been generated by this site prior to its mentions on news sites. Hopefully ongoing benefits (people who are little more clued in about internet scams) will be generated by other of their fake sites. SEC did throw this one away--at least for now--by using it as the basis for a press release.
only thing that drives our society is money.
don't be such a cynic. Just because comptuer geeks never find it doesn't mean there isn't anything more. There are a few people in the real world who have found love, and that drives them to things that money doesn't,
Saddly, as a comptuer geek I can note the existance of this phenomenon, but cannot accually participate. I also note that most who claim to have found it realise in 10 years that they have not. Still there are exceptions.
"You just accidentally voted for George W Bush! That was extremely foolish. But it doesn't matter because the outcome of the election is up to Enron and the Supreme Court."
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Looks like they recently changed their stock symbol
That's because they got kicked off the NYSE. Only NYSE stocks have ticker symbols of 3 or fewer characters. As an OTC stock, they had to pick a new symbol.
Dummy. Taxes are to distribute the wealth of your economy to those less fortunate.
OK, probably a troll, but just in case you're really that misguided... Let's just presume that your idealistic notion is accurate (although it's demonstrably false; see below, where this rather-long response ties back to the SEC site topic). What are the real implications? The surface implication for those who can't think more deeply is that taxes are a fairy tale come true -- steal from the rich and give to the poor, very Robin Hood. But how noble is that really? There are some deeper implications that many taxpayers might find immoral, such as:
Actually I could go on but I'm on my lunch break and must wrap this up before it is time to go back "on the clock" to support those on welfare. (Actually, I'm being partially sarcastic; read on for the debunking of that notion, along with the debunking of your original idea about what taxes mean.)
So if, as you incorrectly state, taxes are to take from the rich and give to the poor (where 'poor' -- according to you -- includes poor in mind as well as bank), this "noble" idea is only noble on the surface, and evil lurks not far beneath.
Luckily, taxpayers can rest assured that taxes don't mean what you say they mean...
...but they should be made uneasy again by seeing, below, what they should mean versus what they do mean at present (speaking from the US perspective, to stay on topic of the SEC). By the way, what you implied matches neither what taxes are nor what they should be.
I stated above that your concept of taxes is demonstrably false. How could that be demonstrated? Follow the bouncing penny! Follow the funds to see where they really go. The bulk of tax funds go to government programs that are ostensibly for the common good. Not the good of just those unwilling or unable to contribute to society and the economy, but everyone. (Maybe it's different where you are, but around here we don't have roads and highways set aside for 'poor' people only.)
Had I not said "ostensibly," there would be no difference between what taxes are and what they should be. The difference is in the beneficiary. Ask yourself, who creates taxes (generally speaking; I realize there is some complexity, but it can be bypassed safely at the moment)? From an entirely selfish perspective, would it not make sense for taxes to benefit those who create them? Of course, our taxes don't go directly to our elected "representatives" (other than in the form of regularly-increased and already-very-large salaries), but taxes we pay do go, indirectly, to support the political careers of incumbents.
This really should be obvious by now, but you might miss it, since you claim to believe in something that is obviously not the case. So let me illustrate: Pat Senator wants to be re-elected. Pat Senator knows that a certain government program for the "common" good is particularly good for constituents in the district responsible for that re-election. Pat Senator also knows that the program needs funding, and that the burden of funding for it can be spread over a much wider population than the Senator's constituents. Time for a new tax!
Tax funds are only marginally used to "take from the rich and give to the poor." Vastly, they are used to support political careers, by supporting businesses that make campaign contributions and by supporting constituents who vote. So what should be for the common good, really is for the good of politicians.
This isn't news, by the way. I'm not telling anybody anything they don't already know -- just what they might prefer to ignore.
The question originally was, who pays for the SEC web sites? The implication, I believe, is why should taxpayers pay for these sites? It's a valid question -- for reasons already noted beyond the scope of my message, the SEC sites will do little or nothing to "help the poor." Are they part of a program to help the common good (really)? Are they part of a program that will help a politician's career? Or are they the result of a side-effect of a corrupt political system, that being insufficient "change control." In other words, perhaps they're just the result of somebody saying, "Hey, I've got an idea" and there being insufficient structure to prevent the idea from taking form without proof of validity.
Regardless, it sounds like a government-spec government program: An ineffective use (a.k.a., waste) of resources.
There goes my lunch hour...
No Laughing Allowed!
http://www.wemarket4u.net/
It looks like they've been doing this for around two years now.
Now all i need to do is seed the internet with copies of said sites - however I will not tell the people about their unwise investing... rather I will take their investments and apply them to my world domination fund!!!
Thanks SEC.
I don't think the SEC really gets it. I've been wrong lots of times before and I might be here. Personally, whenever I see a website that contains something that I'm even moderately curious about, I click on their "order here" button even if I'm not going to order anything. My hopes is that they might have some additional piece of critical information that wasn't obvious in the rest of their sight (for example shipping costs, payment options, etc). The point is that I generally investigate a site pretty thoroughly before I commit to sending any of *my* information to them.
I doubt that I'm alone in this practice. What this means is that clicking on the "gotcha link" at McWhortle.com isn't really a gotcha. It's just part of trying to find out additional information about the company. If you really want to implement the "gotcha" I would think you'd have to delay the "gotcha" right up until someone actually is really ready to bid/purchase/whatever. You got to get to the point, I'd think, where people are actually thinking about doing this, and *then* hit them with the "gotcha". Otherwise, anyone who gets to the current "gotcha page" is going to dismiss it with, "Well, yeah I kinda thought this wasn't right. Glad I don't get caught by these things. Glad I don't have to worry about these kind of scams... on the other hand, check out this other site! Wow, investments in working cold fusion?"
I would think if you're trying to convince someone that they are too gullible, you got to catch them in the process of actually having taken the bait. Otherwise, they're not likely to learn.
$.02. Am I off my rocker?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Go to the front page here, to see how many suckers each site has gotten:
http://www.wemarket4u.net/
Twoflower
--
Twoflower
Nice post. Well thought out and presented. For the sake of this argument, a wealthy person is anyone who can afford a house and car. What we might call the lower-middle class.
/only/ purpose of taxes. :P Yes, I didn't qualify my statement, but you yourself admit that this is at least one of the purposes of taxes. Also note that I never said that this wealth was distributed in cash form (although it is, through some programs, obviously). This redistribution goes towards many things: education, support, training, whatever. That's still a redistribution of wealth in my opinion.
/is/ a reward, and that the freeloaders (the poor, the stupid) are perfectly happy to live off the backs of others. While we don't have time to debate such an axiom, it is not the axiom under under which I base my viewpoints. I believe people's primary motivation in life is to attain a social status by way of participating and contributing to the society they live in. Note that I'm not talking about material status, although in the world we live in, this is one of the only ways to attain and advertise one's position within the social heirarchy. Many an economist and phycologist have promoted the goal to contibute to one's society as the primary motivator of humans. I tend to agree .. while we equate money as reward in this society, the poor people I know are not as interested in money as they are to have the ability to have the resources required to begin contributing to their society. While the church of today is money, I'm of the opinion that it is only the sufficiently conditioned who has come to believe that people are only after enough weath to exist and/or to spend on consumption rather than self-betterment. Note, exceptions are abound, but I suppose I'm just saying that I believe the numbers fall more in the favour of those who wish to contribute rather than those who are truely content with receiving state-distributed welfare of various sorts. It is, in my opinion, only the widening gap in incomes and standards of living that are contributing to the increasing number of people who are so unhappy regarding their relative lack of wealth that they cannot focus on their desire to contribute to society in the first place. Ironically, most of the wealthy people I know (I work in that world) value money as reward FAR more than the poor people I know (I socialize in a very bohemian social circle). It's frusterating to see wealthy people suggest that poor people are driven by the same things they are, and then /withhold/ that very value to the point where these poor people can't afford the things that they both value .. food, water, rent, and cultural opportunities such as socializing. Consider the disproportionate amount of people in this society that wish to contribute in a vain that is unsupported by big business (arts, culture, non-quantitative branches of medicine, etc, etc .. whatever the wealthy elite don't value.) Essentially I am saying that withholding the redistribution of wealth, at least within a society that does not go to the ends of the earth to promote material gain as the primary human motivator, results in more people unwilling to contribute rather than people freeloading off the system.
.. some can, and do! But not enough, yet ...
... well, do a little reading from schools of thought that are vohemently opposed to by our current social and economic system.
Three comments:
1. I didn't say this was the
2. Your argument regarding the fact that people who get this money (the poor) are being rewarded for being sloth is based on the assumption that motivation comes from wealth. Ie, that money
3. > would it not make sense for taxes to benefit those who create them
Programs for the common good includes the poor. It's an obvious enough point that, certainly, those who create taxes should see a reasonable (by reasonable, this is set by the social barometer of the society the taxes are collected in) return in the form of programs and services that help them. I suppose that the relative contention to my point simply illustrates where that barometer is.
All of this is notwithstanding the most sacreligious viewpoint I hold: that much of the opposition to taxes is not due to those who 'freeload' on it, but rather the disproportionate and unhealthy value that those with wealth place on it. If only they could 'let go' a little and made poor people happier (and thus far more likely to re-enter society as a contributing member), they might come to realize that freeloading is, for all intents and purposes, a creation of the very populous who is so disagreeable with the idea of redistributing their priviledged earnings. And of course
4. Back to the real issue at hand. Free-market capitalism is touted as the system that leads to the most efficient use of available resources (be they material, or effort). It would appear that squashing investment fraud is one such way to ensure that those resources are fed back into the fast-and-furious system, much to the delight of the big business types, rather than to the shady ones who don't feed back into the system. Therefore, I charge that, if you are into the free-market capitalist school of thought, you'd believe that this does benifit everyone in so far as it ensures that all generated value goes back to the proper religion (if you will).
Obstinately is a good word, but please don't forget that nothing is a top-down system. The more people that perceive that taxes go to the fat cats, the more likely fat-cats will feel that their self-interest isn't as likely to hurt them in terms of their public relations. There are many ways to buck that trend (and it is getting worse), but being reluctant to contribute to the taxation system is a protest that ends up more on the backs of the already unfortunate (and, as you point out, all of us) than the well-off polician who, really, at the end of the day, could live with less financial perks to his job. Also, it's somewhat of a skewered viewpoint, as it relates back to my first point, and that part of this viewpoint is promoted by big business to swing your trust from the public sector to the private one. And if you don't believe all that
But really, good argument. I see your views, but I choose to believe that part of your axioms are resonsible for these 'freeloaders' we (well, you and others, not I) are so loathe to support through taxes.
"Old man yells at systemd"
That's because they got kicked off the NYSE. Only NYSE stocks have ticker symbols of 3 or fewer characters. As an OTC stock, they had to pick a new symbol.
They (ENRNQ) only got to pick the first 4 letters of their symbol - the "Q" suffix indicates the company is involved in bankruptcy proceedings. There's a table of codes here if anyone's interested.
I smell cover-up, we are running a deficit, the SEC is putting up fraudulent web sites. I suspect they will take the users money and balance the budget.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
:) actually it would seem that the SEC is the gullible one in this. I bet some young MLM super marketdroid made a mint on selling this idea to the SEC and telling them that they need to pay himto help them setup this system...
scam of the century for whomever came up with this idea and got paid for it!
.
I hate to defend Enron...but you should probably wait until the facts are straightened out before jumping to too many conclusions. It's very possible that Enron operated within the law...just about everything that I've heard about is (or could be, depending on unknown circumstances), technically, legal. Though Enron pushed them a liitle further than most
It's legal to set up off shore subsidaries to launder money for tax purposes. (Exxon has 6, Enron had 900+)
It's legal, and common practice, to have employer stock heavy 401k's. A lot of companies match 401k contributions with company stock. This is, in effect, free money to the employee. Many employees take advantage of this, and end up having an undiversified 401k account.
It's legal to prevent employees from seeling their 401k stock...if it's not paid for. A lot of companies will finance the price of their stock fro their employees, and deduct the cost from their paycheck for a period of time. Until it's completely paid off, you can't sell the stock. It's possible that this was how it worked at Enron. The execs, making more money, were able to pay off their stock purchases befor rank ands filers.
And of course, campaign contributions are legal. And so is asking an administration for help...and even getting it (see General Motors and the airline industry).
Okay folks. Many people are claiming that nobody would be stupid enough to fall for the (known) SEC fakes. Especially if their fake status becomes "common knowledge". Well, I've got some news for you.
There are people who forward chain letters because they're afraid they'll die if they don't. There are people who believe Amway will make them rich. There are people who think Scientology makes sense. There are people who killed themselves in late 1999 (IIRC) to meet on the backside of a comet.
There are people who believe that Bill Gates will pay them for being part of an email tracking experiment. There are people who believe computer viruses can make your ice cream go all melty (well, maybe that's stretching things...). Some people gave money, of their own free will, to Donald Trump.
And there are people who believed GW Bush had a "clear policy for the Middle East" during the presidential debates.
You could show the mcwhortle site to these people, tell them it's a fake, and they'd still fall for it. While we like to claim that those who write "first post" are the least intelligent creatures on earth, they're already head-and-shoulders above the people the SEC is trying to help. Many of these people are retired, and hoping to get something back from the society they gave 40+ years of work to (like my father). Some of these people abandon all reason when it comes to this hope (unlike my father, thankfully).
The SEC is trying to reduce the number of fraud-related tragedies among these people, and I think it's a good thing. In fact, I think this is one of the coolest things I've seen our government do for the public, ever. The SEC seems to have a clue about real life and real people, unlike the Whitehouse and Congress (no matter who is in residence at the time).
-Paul Komarek