For the past several years Agoracom Investor Relations Corp. has run a burgeoning Internet forum for attention-starved mining, energy and tech companies, where investors could gather to muse about the stock they hold in those firms.
But what the companies were never told, the Ontario Securities Commission alleges, is that much of the online chatter about those stocks was instead the work of Agoracom's own employees.
Operating under dozens of online aliases, and sometimes holding fake conversations with themselves, the staff actively tried to push up share prices, the regulator alleges. CONTINUES HERE
Meanwhile, first-hand insight was provided to IKN today by Reader 'E', a person who over the months and years has closely followed the conversations at one of the stocks covered by Agoracom. We're going to keep the name of the stock out of this post to protect the possibly innocent, but it's worth mentioning that it's a pennyshare company that this author has never owned. With that said, reader 'E' mailed today and gave insight as a more perceptive user of Agoracom message boards:
Per the scumbags at Agoracom (caught your blog quick thoughts), i agree wholeheartly and i hope they get what's coming to them. I know first hand of their bullshit aliases conjured up when XXX (ticker withheld) was a client of theirs. Aliases talking with one another as if they were buddies in the stock but had no flippin clue of the company, not a clue! The postings stopped once the contract between Agoracom & XXX stopped, go figure how that all works. With a little backtracking which i did the light bulb came one. I'm kinda pissed off about that as they took IR fees each and every month. Anyways, i hope the OSC is dead serious on straightening their act up.
For what it's worth* your humble scribe stopped reading bullboard guff months ago (bar the odd occasion when a link to a post is sent to me by a friend or a foe....usually a foe, in fact) but what I will say is that reader 'E' is a totally trustworthy person and someone who I would support on any given occasion (even though we happen to disagree on the merits of the above pennystock stock in question that he likes). In other words, if reader 'E' says that what's been going on over at Agoracom is scammy, then it's scammy period.
*not much