Again- Sound Familiar?

MESSAGE BOARD POSTERS

Update 1 EXCLUSIVE

Message boards such as Yahoo and Silicon Investor give investors the opportunity to share their views and comments as they may relate to a specific stocks or general investing. It also allows vindictive former employees, competitors, stock manipulators and others to publicly post their negative messages. Negative message posters are generally referred to as "bashers". In most cases these negative posters have "shorted" a certain stock and want to do all that they can to see the stock price move downward. You will find that most negative posters generally work in teams and will often exchange passwords with each other.

When a certain stock comes under fire by groups of negative posters, there is almost always a negative effect on the company that is under attack. The negative posters or bashers will usually have a specific plan of attack. Not only will they post negative messages, they will also send messages to the SEC and other governmental agencies with unfounded and baseless allegations. They will often times contact suppliers and customers of the targeted company and flood them with negative information about the targeted company. The plan of the basher is to create havoc and cause sincere investors to lose confidence in the targeted company. In most circumstances negative posters are loosely organized although they rarely work alone. The negative posters are easy to find and will generally attack companies with weak fundamentals. In many cases they will work hand in hand with journalists, who thrive on negative journalism and hatchet job articles.

Is posting negative information about a company on public message boards illegal? Absolutely not, but there are applicable rules and laws that apply to the posting of information on public message boards. Intentional misinformation is actionable by governmental authorities, especially if it has an effect on the trading price of a security. You will find that all message boards and chat rooms have detailed terms of service (TOS). These are the basic rules that posters must adhere to when posting on specific sites. When a poster violates the TOS, there is a procedure to follow for reporting the said violation to the service provider. Our investigators have used this procedure very effectively and have been directly responsible for having certain postings removed from message boards (ones that were in violation of the TOS) and in many cases we have been effective in removing posters from message boards, for violating the TOS. Almost all message boards will have an icon to report terms of service violations. What we have found to be effective is to report the TOS violations to the service provider and then we will generally follow up with a letter from our legal staff which documents the TOS violations and their effect. This entire process takes about ten days and has proven to be very effective. Message board bashing is not common to only U.S. listed companies. Stock bashing coupled with naked shorting has been a very common occurrence with companies listed on various exchanges in Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Hong Kong; and have had a much more devastating effect than in the U.S. Most of our work has revolved around working with public companies in Asia.

Some basic rules of thumb in dealing with negative posters is to never directly interact with them. They are not your friends. They are not your pen pals. They generally lie and mis-represent the truth. Generally they are posting with the specific intent of hurting the company, financially and ultimately hurting your investment. Never engage in e-mail communication with the bashers and never ever base an investment decision on information posted on public message boards. Do your own independent due dilligence before investing.

This exclusive report has been prepared by Asiavest investigators: Andy Chen (Taipei), Joyce Lu (Beijing) and Frank Taylor (Los Angeles).

Copyright 2003 Asiavest Investigative Services. All Rights Reserved.