Stock scams

Cannabis Stocks and the Old Pump and Dump

Capital Markets, Investors, Issuers, Law , , , , ,

People seem to hate me when I state the simple truth that cannabis  is illegal everywhere in the US. The Obama Administration decided to focus its drug enforcement budget on the cartels and large suppliers and not on small retail dealers.  Deciding not to bust small dealers did not make cannabis legal anywhere in the US.  Just because the federal government will not spend money to send 20 officers to kick down the door of a small dealer, they will still charge you with “intent to sell” if they find a few pounds of cannabis in the trunk of your car.

The former US Attorney General, Jeff Sessions was fairly clear that he wanted to keep cannabis illegal. What the incoming Attorney General will do is anyone’s guess.  The one clear truth is that action by states purporting to make cannabis legal within their borders does not actually make it legal anywhere under federal law.

Notwithstanding,many people seem to believe that there is a “legal” market for cannabis and a lot of people are finding ways to cash in believing that the federal government will continue to look the other way. That has encouraged the flow of a lot of new money into the “new” cannabis marketplace. As these cannabis companies are new, small and somewhat precarious given they often cannot get a bank account,some companies have sought funding in the microcap stock market where small companies can go public.  

Few investors come in contact with “microcap” or “penny stocks”.   Many of the very large brokerage firms will not touch very low priced shares and certainly will not recommend them.  Fewer investors are the victims of the “pump and dump” schemes that plague this portion of the marketplace. Even fewer investors actually understand how a pump and dump works or how to spot one.

The  blueprint for these pump and dump scams is often the same. These scams will often start with a “shell” corporation, a public company with few assets and minimal operations.  In a typical scenario a public “shell” corporation would acquire a private, ongoing business in exchange for stock.  There would be a press release, often several over the first few months that would begin to tell the story that the promoters wanted to tell, especially how this company was going to grow and grow.

The story would be told to thousands of investors through the stockbrokers who would be on the phones, cold calling people around the US with this week’s“tip”.  They would stay at it until enough people bought the stock to make the share price go up. There would often be subsequent acquisitions, subsequent press releases and subsequent hype.  All of the hype caused more people to buy the stock and the price to go further up.  As the price moved up, the insiders who bought for very little when the company  was still a shell could dump their shares.

This can be very lucrative for the people who bought the shares in the shell for pennies a share. It can also be lucrative for the brokers because getting the stock price up and then selling it to unsuspecting members of the public can mean a lot of transactions and a lot of commissions and mark-ups.  It is not unusual for even a small pump and dump scheme to net the promoters and brokers $10-$20 million or more. Consequently, people who pump and dump the shares of one company (often a team of promoters and stockbrokers)  frequently do it repeatedly.

Organized crime settled into the stock brokerage industry in a big way by backing or owning a number of small brokerage firms in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the firms were the quintessential boiler rooms like the ones depicted by Hollywood in The Wolf of Wall Street or BoilerRoom. By the early 1990s these boiler rooms proliferated in lower Manhattan, Long Island, New Jersey and Florida.  By 2000, the SEC was telling Congress that several of these firms were owned by or worked with the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese crime families.  

A significant amount of regulatory scrutiny and regulatory actions followed,but that did not stop the billions of dollars of profit that was skimmed off by the miscreants.  The SEC closed down a few of those firms, barred a few people from the securities business and put a few of the people in jail.  But the beat goes on. 

Boiler  rooms are still active today and still working out of Manhattan, Long Island, New Jersey and Florida. They are still cold calling unsuspecting retail investors around the country. They are still using press releases and more recently “independent” fake investment newsletters to pump up what are essentially shell companies. 

In the 1990s the companies were “exciting” because they were going to capitalize in some way on the internet, a new and exciting technology that a lot of people believed could make a lot of money. People were happy to invest in every “internet” company that came along.Today, the pump and dumps have found cannabis stocks as a perfect substitute.   Which brings us to Aphria (NYSE:APHA). 

Aphria is a Canadian cannabis company that is trying to rapidly stake out its territory in new foreign cannabis markets. It traded over the counter in the US until November when it up listed to the NYSE.   The stock price has moved up as the company made a series of acquisitions and announcements in the last year. 

Last week it was the subject of a fairly scathing report by a research company and short seller that questioned whether the company had grossly overvalued some of those acquisitions.  Aphria has retorted that the company’s acquisitions were fine and properly valued and essentially that short sellers cannot be trusted.

Personally I thought that the research report was well written and seemed to have been well researched. There were photos of the headquarters and operations of some of the acquired companies that left a lot to be desired. There were copies of documents that supported the idea that insiders may be guilty of undisclosed self dealing. I thought that the valuations are clearly questionable and that alone was a big red flag. 

What got my interest and what troubled me the most was the discussion of who was involved with Aphria.The report goes out of its way to set out the facts and affiliations surrounding Andrew DeFrancesco who was apparently a founding investor and strategic advisor to Aphria. The report ties Mr. DeFrancesco to  several pump and dump schemes and affiliations with several pump and dump schemers.

These schemers include Paul Honig, John Stetson and John O’Rourke. The SEC brought an action against these three in September specifically charging them with operating pump and dump schemes in the shares of three companies.  I suspect there were other companies whose shares were manipulated by this group as well.  The report points out that in at least one company DeFrancesco’s wife was an early holder of cheap stock.

The report also ties DeFrancesco with a gentleman named Robert Genovese. In 2017,the SEC charged Genovese with operating a separate pump and dump scheme.  So if Aphria’s founding investor has connections with 2 separate pump and dump operators,, and has set himself up to benefit handsomely if Aphria’s stock price should be pumped up, what inferenc e would you make? 

The research report was published by a company called Hindenburg Investment Research. I have no affiliation with them whatsoever and I have never traded shares of Aphria either long or short.  Not surprisingly, a lot of market “experts” refuse to accept any information put into the market by any short seller.  That would be a mistake.

In addition to providing liquidity for the markets, short sellers provide a valuable service because the investment world is grossly overpopulated by“longs”.  The prospects for every company cannot always be rosy. If standard analysis can tell us when the price of a stock is likely to go up, that same analysis can tell us when the price is likely to come down. 

Short sellers truly love to spot scams. If this report is correct about Aphria and the company has grossly overvalued its acquisitions and is being pumped up only to have the insider’s shares dumped into the market, then sooner or later the stock may go to zero or very close to it. That is a win for any short seller.

There is more than enough information in the research report for any small investor who wants to invest in a cannabis company to make an intelligent decision not to invest in Aphria. But please do not think that Aphria is the only cannabis stock whose price may be the pumped up not because its prospects are actually good,but because someone has a lot of stock to dump into the market. As I was researching this article I saw at least a half dozen cannabis related microcap stocks that did not pass the smell test. There are undoubtedly more.

Remembering Bre-X- The First Big Internet Stock Scam

Issuers, Law , ,

It has been 20 years since the Bre-X stock scam.  It may not be completely accurate to call it the first internet stock manipulation, but it was certainly the largest for its time. The scam was based upon false information that the company originally circulated on the internet. After a while large companies and the mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon. Then large investors followed.

Bre-X was a Canadian penny stock company whose share price went from about $.30 per share in 1993 to over $250 in 1997. The stock was originally traded on the Alberta Stock Exchange and later the Toronto Exchange and then moved to NASDAQ.

At the end, it took only about one month or so for Bre-X to unravel completely.  When the stock collapsed, investors had lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $5-$6 billion.

Bre-X has a fairly simple story. The company claimed to have located a huge deposit of gold, perhaps the largest single deposit ever discovered, deep in the jungle on the island of Borneo which is part of Indonesia.

People have been scamming investors with claims of huge gold discoveries for a long time. And as they say “greed is a powerful motivator”.

As far as anyone knows the entire a scam was the product of no more than 3 people.  The primary players were David Walsh the founder and largest shareholder of Bre-X, John Felderhof the chief geologist and Michael de Guzman the on-site geologist in Borneo.

Walsh purchased the property located in the middle of a jungle in 1993 on the advice of Felderhof.  The on-site geologist, de Guzman, took samples which were assayed. He initially estimated that the deposit was equal to 2 million Troy ounces of gold. The estimate of the site’s size and worth increased over time. In 1995 the estimate was raised to 30 million ounces, in 1996 it was raised to 60 million and finally in 1997 the estimate was 70 million ounces.

There was actually no gold at the site. It was later revealed that de Guzman was “salting” the samples he was sending to be assayed, i.e. he was adding gold shavings to the samples.  There is nothing particularly new about this scam. People had salted gold and silver mines to gain investors before. What was new is that the fake information was disseminated over the internet.

The internet in 1994-1997 was very different than it is today. Computer screens still had no color. You could not upload or attach documents. There were no search engines.  E-mail was primitive and very few people had an e-mail address. There were 3 primary services that you could use for internet access; America On-Line, Prodigy and CompuServe.

I was an early CompuServe user. I say early because my account number had only six digits. I would usually access CompuServe in the evenings via my dial-up modem.  It was primarily a collection of forums and primitive chat rooms where users could swap information and discuss various subjects.  There was a section dedicated to stocks.

Bre-X was certainly one of the most often talked about stocks during this period. There might only be one or two dozen people who left comments but you knew that many more were silently lurking and reading them.  I was reading the comments late in the evening on the West Coast. There were certainly people who were writing comments and other people reading them on the East Coast the next morning.  There was a lot of information about Bre-X to post and discuss.

As new assays were supposedly being taken and the estimates about the size of the potential strike went up and up, larger players tried to put their hand into the cookie jar.

First there was a failed take-over attempt by Placer Dome which was a much larger mining company. Next, the government of Indonesia (then a corrupt dictatorship) tried to bring Barrick Gold on board. The government claimed to be concerned that a small company like Bre-X might not be able to handle a large mining operation,

Later, the government brokered a deal whereby Freeport-McMoran a third large mining company, would have a majority interest and run the mine.  Members of Indonesian President Suharto’s family and their cronies got a cut of that deal as well.

Once the shares were on the NASDAQ in 1996, Lehman Brothers and other big firms started to follow the stock. There were articles about it in the Wall Street Journal and the mainstream media.

Everyone seemed to think that the gold deposit that had been discovered in the middle of the jungle on Borneo might be larger than expected and that other sites in the jungle might be the next to be explored.  The “smart money” seemed to think that it was only a matter of time before more gold was discovered.

Freeport-McMoran began its due diligence by drilling samples in early February 1997. The internet chat rooms were on fire with the speculation that the results might show richer deposits than did previous samples.  But it was not to be.

The scam ended abruptly in mid-March when the geologist, de Guzman, supposedly fell (or was pushed) out of a helicopter over the jungle. The body that was recovered days later was badly disfigured and identified through dental records.  The body quickly disappeared from the local morgue. People have claimed to have sighted de Guzman in Canada and elsewhere in the years since.

Freeport McMoran reported the results from its test a few weeks later stating that there was little or no gold on the site.  There were a few subsequent tests which concluded that the gold in the original samples had come from elsewhere which is how we now know that the early samples were salted.

The stock, of course, collapsed.  Trading was suspended in Toronto and on NASDAQ and the company filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy revealed that three large Canadian public pension funds had been big investors and hence, big losers.

Walsh claimed innocence of the whole affair, moved to the Bahamas and died of natural causes. Felderhof was charged with insider trading (he had apparently sold millions of dollar’s worth of stock along the way) but was eventually acquitted.  Class actions brought on behalf of shareholders returned virtually nothing to them.

Just before the end, Bre-X had blamed the meltdown of the share price on the internet.  Walsh claimed that the rumors that the company had no gold had emanated from enemies of the Indonesian government and that the people in the internet chat rooms were short sellers who wanted to see the company fail.

It is certainly correct to argue that the stock would never have run-up if the “news” about the alleged gold discovery had not circulated in the chat rooms.  It is certainly fair to assume that the stock price would have gone higher if many more people had visited these chat rooms.  As the share price went up, more and more people became convinced that the people saying it will go higher must know what they are talking about.

It is appropriate to consider just how high the price of Bre-X might have gone if there had been as many internet users then as there are now.  In the 1990s the internet was just flexing its muscles. Today it can easily move the price of any investment up or down. People who know nothing can sound like geniuses if the the stock price goes up after they say that it should.

Bre-X is actually a model for a modern pump and dump schemes.  All you need to do is acquire a lot of shares in a penny stock, set up one or more investment newsletter websites and drive traffic to those sights by sending e-mails to lists of investors.  The SEC has closed down internet investment sites that have done just that.

If there is anything that any investor should learn from the Bre-X scam it is that you should only take investment advice from people that you know and trust.  A lot of what you hear on the internet is just not real.