Sam Antar: Inside a white collar criminal's mind

Sam Antar is a site friend round here, as he runs the excellent scambusting website White Collar Fraud that is out there pointing the finger at dubious accounting practices and SEC filings in U.S. listed companies. And Antar should know, as he himself is a convicted felon for accounting fraud (check out his highly entertaining posts and disclaimers that tell you straight who he is right here).

So National Public Radio has, as part of its Planet Money series, interviewed Sam Antar and the result is out today right here in podcast form. If you want to know how the white collar criminal's mind works and just why people feel compelled to rip others off via dubious enterprises (and my stars, there's plenty to go around in our chosen field of junior miners), the Antar interview is well worth listening to. Here's the link again so no excuses, leave this humble corner of cyberspace immediately and do something worthwhile with your online time. Here's the blurb from NPR to get you in the mood:

In the seventies and eighties, the Antar family ran Crazy Eddie, a popular electronics chain known for its frenetic commercials.
The business was crooked from the start, but the fraud got more serious when the family took the company public in the 1984. In 1987, the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the family and discovered years of inflated profits and overstated income.
On today's show, one of the masterminds of the fraud, Eddie's cousin Sam Antar, explains how they did it and why it worked for so long.

Scam Busters! A new link category at IKN

Over there on the right of the blog your humble scribe has put together a new category of links for the dee lek tay shun of his esteemed readership. Called Scam Busters (not a great title, but it'll do) it's a collection of blogs and websites that are sometimes or alltimes dedicated to rooting out the scumbag scam runners and bad egg companies in the world of stock markets (with a lot of mining scams usually on the menus). Here's the list as seen:

Scam Busters

• Dances With Bears: John Helmer covers Russia
• David Baines Howe St. Files: Baines' blog
• David Baines Vancouver Sun: Canada's top white collar crime-chaser. Excellent resource.
• Green Laser Reviews: How newsletters run their rip-offs
• Sam Antar: Ex-fraudster on today's market con-artists
• Stock Gumshoe: Useful paid tout tracker
• The Street Sweeper: Melissa Davis with plenty of OTC scam sleuthing
• Toby Shute: Covers mainly O&G, pulls no punches

Of those, David Baines, ace reporter at The Vancouver Sun, deserves top billing for his tireless work against the scumballs of the Vancouver junior mining world. In the link list he has two spots, one for his regular Vancouver Sun column and one for his personal blog, a place where he often picks up on the reported story and adds more flavour. We very heart Baines.

Dances With Bears' John Helmer knows more about the shady Russian business scene than anyone else that writes in the English language. Watches the Russian billionaire community and their massive resource companies like a hawk.

Sam Antar is the felon who was CFO at Crazy Eddie's, the accounting fraud in the 1980s. He did time for his rip-offs and has recently turned over a leaf, running a website that exposes accounting fraud and general sleaze in the US markets. Also, make sure you read the disclosure he puts at the end of his posts as it's very entertaining.

Our pal Amberger over at Green Laser is also an ex-insider blowing the whistle, but not an ex-felon. He was an integral part of the newsletter promo industry for years and has recently taken it upon himself to expose the dirty doings, tricks and scams publishers use to part you from your hard-earned cash. Excellent website and fun to read, too.

Toby Shute is an IKN friend of old. A top brain when it comes to independent O&G analysis, he's not dedicated to exposing the iffy side of the industry but never holds back on a story if there's one to be told. Motley Fool's top echelon of writers includes Toby, not a doubt.

Stock Gumshoe is a community-based site that watches the newsletter world, working out the mystery tips and passing judgement on the worth of many letter services out there.

Street Sweeper covers mainly US markets and a lot of the OTC scams that are run there (and my stars, there are tons of those). Deep analsyis of each case and careful backgorund checks in the posts.

So there's a quick'n'dirty on each site, but I'd be VERY interested to hear from you guys about other sites not mentioned that do the same kind of thing. If you know of a scam busting website not featured, a mail with its URL to otto.rock1 (AT) gmail (DOT) com would be greatly appreciated.