Deep Capture Podcast: fixing internet libel [18:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

There are, for the most part, two ways for non-insiders to improperly influence stock prices: either through manipulative trading or the spreading of misinformation.  Both are done with the intention of sparking unwarranted hype or panic in the broader market.

It was a combination of trade-based and information-based manipulation that led to the sudden collapse of both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. In response, regulators finally made it much more difficult to engage in trade-based manipulation – on the short side, at least – and the result has been a dramatic reduction in the prevalence of the practice.

What has not been reduced is the prevalence of greed, which I’ve predicted would cause would-be manipulators to shift resources away from trade-based manipulation in favor of its information-based counterpart.

We all know what this means: more anonymous message board posters and bloggers making unsubstantiated claims about a company’s prospects. Whether done on the long or short side, this is wrong. But what makes it particularly pernicious on the short side is the lasting, negative impact the practice has on the reputations of real people, as a target company’s management is very frequently subjected to particularly libelous claims which inevitably accumulate and darken reputations as determined –more and more each day, unfortunately – by Google and other search engines unconcerned over the accuracy of the information they return in response to queries about real people and organizations.

That someone can spend years creating a good name for themselves and their company, only to have dedicated, anonymous miscreants tarnish both in a matter of months or even weeks at virtually zero cost is highly suggestive of a system that’s broken.

And yet it’s the one we’re stuck with.

Michael Roberts, founder of Rexxfield

The good thing about markets is that if needs develop, eventually, enterprising individuals will step in to fill them. In this case, the need is online reputation management and repair, and the enterprising individual is Michael Roberts, founder of Rexxfield, a company dedicated to reorganizing online information in favor of accuracy, fairness and balance.

Roberts arrived at the Rexxfield concept in the most genuine of ways: as a frustrated target of a vicious internet libel campaign. Eventually, Roberts took the lessons learned through the process of solving his own problems and built a company around them.

We met recently, and I recorded the conversation. Here are some of the highlights. I’ve also included portions of a chat I had with Patty McPeak, one of Rexxfield’s earliest clients. You may either download the mp3 or listen to it now, by clicking the “play” button below.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence of Wikipedia these days, particularly when it comes to informing media coverage. A recent experiment, carried out by a student in Ireland, makes this very clear. So it should come as no surprise that those who wish to minimize the perceived impact of illegal naked short selling on markets and the economy as a whole have made the online encyclopedia a major point of focus.

Recently, yet another effort to infiltrate and alter the content of Wikipedia by a proponent of illegal shorting came to light and was foiled. As before, the infiltrator was former Business Week reporter Gary Weiss (whom a senior contributor recently termed “one of [Wikipedia’s] most slippery sockpuppeteers”), operating for over a year in complete defiance of an edict specifically banning him from the site based on his very well-documented history of abusing Wikipedia for his own conflicted purposes.

In the past (as you can read about here), we know Weiss spread misinformation relating to stock fraud via Wikipedia on behalf of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the Wall Street firm considered a key enabler of illegal short selling. Exactly who’s sponsoring Weiss these days is unclear; however, as the evidence that follows will demonstrate, his concerted effort to whitewash DTCC’s Wikipedia article makes that company the prime suspect.

Now that his ruse has been uncovered – yet again – the focus becomes one of identifying and repairing the damage done. A brief review of some of the thousands of changes made by Weiss will give you a sense of both the scope of the problem and the nature of his motives. I’m organizing the following tiny sampling of Weiss’s Wikipedia edits by topic, with the content as it originally appeared on the left, with Weiss’s changes on the right. Words added or removed appear in red.

As you read what follows, ask yourself two questions:

1. Which version, be it the left (before Weiss) or the right (after Weiss), better reflects reality and serves readers (particularly journalists) seeking to form an opinion?
2. What might be Weiss’s motive for obsessively making these changes (and literally hundreds more like them)?

If there is a silver lining to this cloud, it’s the following: Wikipedia’s current ruling Arbitration Committee, which has the unenviable task of, among other things, dealing with Weiss and his continued efforts to subvert their authority, is genuinely interested in doing the right thing in this situation. Though you might take that for granted, I can assure you that this has not always been the case. Indeed, at one time, Wikipedia’s ArbCom seemed to go out of its way to enable Weiss’s abuse of this most important social media platform, resulting in (if you can believe it) an even greater number of yet more dramatically skewed and self-serving changes to these articles by Weiss.

Wikipedia has come a long way since then.

Finally, it seems unlikely that Portfolio.com, where he authors a business column, is aware of Gary Weiss’s actions. They would probably appreciate knowing more. If you agree, consider sending a brief and informative note to Condé Nast Publications Group President David Carey: David_Carey@condenast.com.

Postscript: If you’re at all unclear on why you should be bothered that DTCC seems to have hired former journalist Gary Weiss to cover-up the crime of illegal of naked short selling, I strongly suggest you check out Lila Rajiva’s recent post on the composition of that company’s board of directors.

_____________________

And now, for what long-time readers of DeepCapture.com will recognize as my favorite part of writing about Gary Weiss: a little running up of the score (piling on with additional insights that don’t necessarily make the case on their own, but certainly make the case much more entertaining).

After discovering the Wikipedia edit placing Gary Weiss within the Fort Knox-like DTCC (see this for the explanation, if you didn’t already follow the link above), I sent DTCC spokesman Stuart Z. Goldstein the following email:

From: Judd Bagley
To: Stuart Goldstein
Sent: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 10:24 PM
Subject: media inquiry
Mr. Goldstein,
Yesterday I received some information suggesting Gary Weiss either is or has been hired or retained by the DTCC (or DTC or NSCC). Can you confirm the existence of a professional relationship between Gary Weiss and your organization?

More than two days passed with no response. Finally, I received the following:

From: Stuart Goldstein
To: Judd Bagley
Date: Fri, Feb 2, 2007 at 12:00 PM
Subject: your inquiry

*** Body Not Included ***

That’s right…the body of the email read only “*** Body Not Included ***”

With that, I responded:

From: Judd Bagley
To: Stuart Goldstein
Date: Fri, Feb 2, 2007 at 1:20 PM
Subject: Re: your inquiry

Mr. Goldstein,
Thanks for your reply, though the body appears to be missing…may I trouble
you to re-send your reply?

Goldstein’s record-breaking response (especially considering his earlier reply took two days to arrive) hit my inbox three minutes later:

From: Stuart Goldstein
To: Judd Bagley
Date: Fri, Feb 2, 2007 at 1:23 PM
Subject: Re: your inquiry

My response to your question is no.

On the surface, this would seem to be Goldstein denying a relationship between DTCC and Weiss. The problem is, I didn’t ask a yes or no question. I asked him to confirm something specific, to which he responded “no.” The answer didn’t fit.

I twice asked Goldstein to clarify his response, and was twice ignored.

That’s when I realized I’d been played.

Goldstein’s quick reply of “My response to your question is no” was probably calculated beforehand as his response to my inevitable request that he re-send the reply which read only “*** Body Not Included ***”.

He got me.

Here’s how this applies to Weiss.

Weiss’s most recently-banned Wikipedia sockpuppet, known as JohnnyB256, generally began to arouse suspicion in September, following a series of extremely slanted edits to the Wikipedia article on DTCC. At that time, multiple Wikipedia editors asked JohnnyB256 if he had a relationship with Gary Weiss. JohnnyB256 avoided answering the question (other than to dismiss it as “unmitigated gall”) until a senior Wikipedia administrator known as Lar inserted himself into the conversation to say he felt it was a “reasonable question.”

JohnnyB256 then responded, in a way that was unambiguously directed to Lar alone, saying, “The answer to your question is ‘no’.”

Only problem is, Lar was the one person who never asked him the question. Unfortunately, nobody picked up on this serpentine strategy at the time, allowing JohnnyB256 to claim he’d already answered the question of  a link to Weiss when it came up from time to time.

Anybody else suspect Weiss and the DTCC are using the same playbook?

Wikipedia’s Jimbo Wales sees Gary Weiss sockpuppeting all over the internet

As is described at great length in these pages, Wikipedia has been one of the principal battlegrounds in the effort to cover-up the crime of illegal naked short selling.

For just over two key years, former journalist Gary Weiss dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy to the process of gaining control over and skewing the Wikipedia article on naked short selling. We know that given Wikipedia’s influence as a research tool – of journalists in particular – the heavily Weiss-influenced version of the article made it much more difficult than it should have been to get real reporting done on the issue.

Fortunately, as more and more Wikipedians came to see what Weiss was doing, an army of volunteers banded together to prove, beyond any doubt, the extent of Weiss’s deception. Their conclusion: Weiss created multiple Wikipedia identities (commonly known as “sockpuppets”) working in parallel to give the false impression of much more support for his position than actual existed.

This is a huge no-no on Wikipedia, and resulted in Weiss’s permanent expulsion from the project, and the liberation of the naked short selling article (though far too late to matter, as naked short sellers managed to destroy Bear Stearns exactly one month later).

If you’ve followed the Deep Capture saga for very long, that much you probably knew.

Now you’re going to hear the rest of the story.

For the purpose of what follows, you need to know that in 2007, Weiss’s two main Wikipedia sockpuppets were named Mantanmoreland and Samiharris.  In September of that year, a group of Weiss’s protectors decided to create a private mailing list in order to counter the efforts of the growing number of people already working together to expose Weiss, his lies and his enablers.

Included on that private list were Wikipedia’s founder Jimbo Wales and three or four dozen other members of the site’s inner circle. Just to complete the illusion, Gary Weiss also joined the list…twice, as both Mantanmoreland and Samiharris.

Some time ago, I was given many of the emails exchanged by what came to be known as the super-secret Wikipedia Cyberstalking list. What follows is an abridgement of one of them.

The thread begins with Weiss sock Samiharris lamenting the failure of an effort to silence Wikipedia editor Cla68, who had engaged in multiple attempts to make the article on Gary Weiss himself (which was, in fact, written by Weiss) read a little less like a promotional brochure.

The matter became so contentious that Jimbo Wales himself and Cla68 exchanged emails in an attempt to find some common ground. By the time that exchange was over, Jimbo wrote to the members of the Wikipedia Cyberstalking list:

“Cla68 has written to me, and what he has written confirms what I have thought for a long time… I am not the only sane and reasonable person who thinks it very likely that Mantanmoreland is Gary Weiss and who would be thrilled to have a proof otherwise.”

Shortly adding:

“If Mantanmoreland would properly identify himself to me and prove that he is not Gary Weiss, we could put all this to bed quite easily.”

Of course, Mantanmoreland (Weiss) did not appreciate this, and responded:

“I am disheartened by Jimbo’s private comments, disgusted by his handling of stalkers when they correspond with him, and have absolutely zero faith in his ability to properly handle stalker issues himself.  I am sorry, but this is something he should delegate to others. When he privately corresponds with a stalker like Bagley or a helper like Cla68 his heart melts and he gets all mushy. It has happened before and it has happened again. It’s not going to stop. Wikipedia’s handling of stalkers is going to fail as long as stalkers can make headway by privately corresponding with Jimbo.”

Jimbo’s slight mangling of Shakespeare can be forgiven by this, his pitch-perfect response:

“The queen doth protest too much, Gary.”

Weiss’s reply barely manages to contain his rage:

“Oh I missed the “Gary”. Please be sure to use that name every time you refer to me, as I want to be reminded of your behavior tonight…because tonight was the night you officially became a stalker.”

That’s right. Weiss, having found some success labeling me and everybody else intent on enforcing some accountability for his actions “stalkers”, actually applied the label to Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales himself.

At that point, Samiharris (also Weiss, remember) decides to offer himself some support in condemning Wales:

“I have to sleep on it to absorb the magnitude of the founder of Wikipedia acting this way.”

With that, Mantanmoreland and Samiharris signed off.

The next day, Samiharris started a new thread, hoping to recast Mantanmoreland’s earlier attacks on Wales:

“At its very lowest point, Jimbo precisely replicated the tone and content of a [Wikipedia criticism site] Wikipedia Review attack. I mean that literally. His response to Mantanmoreland, calling him “Gary,” could have been made by [Wikipedia Review administrator] Somey.”

To this, Wales offered the response of his life:

“I am frustrated that Mantanmoreland has not been more helpful to us in confirming that he is not Gary Weiss.  I think that the evidence for that is insufficient for us to know for sure, but that on average it tends to suggest it.  I have proposed a few different ways that Mantan could resolve this, but he is unwilling to even consider it.

And I am frustrated with you for your repeated personal attacks on me and complete refusal to assume good faith.  Any allegation against me, no matter how trivial or unsupported by evidence, is accepted by you as fact.  I think that’s unfortunate.

That frustration caused me to be inappropriately blunt with Mantan. But the issue is real. My concern is that if Mantanmoreland is really Gary Weiss, then it is only a matter of time until this is proven…either by Bagley or someone else…and we will find that we have been manipulated in a pretty sad way.

The evidence that Weiss has sockpuppeted all over the Internet is pretty compelling, and even the mainstream press has commented over his refusal to directly address it. Is Mantan one of those socks? We have no proof either way, but I think the evidence tends to suggest it.

It upsets him that I think that, but there you go.  Speaking the truth as I see it seems to me to be the most simple and direct way to correct any errors that I may have.”

Of course, everything I alleged linking Weiss with Mantanmoreland and Samiharris eventually was very publicly proven, and as Wales predicted, the clout once enjoyed by Weiss’s inner circle defenders was forever diminished.

This exchange, and many others like it involving Jimbo Wales and Gary Weiss in his multiple forms, also convinces me that – contrary to what I have openly wondered in the past – Jimbo’s public denial of the Weiss/Mantanmoreland+Samiharris connection, despite his private acceptance of the same, was based primarily on a desire to avoid damaging Wikipedia, as opposed to any theorized influence brought to bear by his associates in the Chicago options trading community (where a key component of illegal naked short selling takes place). I was wrong about that.

There are a few other insights we can take away about Gary Weiss from this exchange.

• First, when backed into a corner, Weiss will reflexively and irresponsibly lash out at his accusers.
• Second, Weiss seems programmed to characterize any efforts at investigating his online misbehavior as “stalking.” That, together with cries of “anti-Semitism,” are the two most well-worn tools in his chest.
• And third, Weiss’s willingness – even eagerness – to go to great lengths to mislead all around him is pathological. He can’t help himself.

Put it all together, and it’s easy to see why Gary Weiss was the logical choice when proponents of illegal naked short selling sought a resolute apologist for their repugnant practice.

NOTE: Though DeepCapture.com publishes on a blog platform, this site is first and foremost a work of journalism. Consequently, we rarely engage in the kinds of back-and-forth exchanges of jabs that tend to define our deeply-conflicted and drama-addicted blogging critics.

Today, I make an exception.

In a recent post, I offered a theory as to why the reporting on a specific incident – DeepCapture contributor and Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne’s filing of a defamation lawsuit against short-selling hedge fund Rocker Partners – was so undeniably polarized. In short, regional and non-business press reported very objectively on the suit, while the New York financial press coverage was overwhelmingly pro-Rocker Partners and anti-Byrne.

My theory cited Facebook friend relationships (information which is, according to Facebook itself, considered public) to demonstrate that with very few exceptions, the authors of the adversarial reporting all have close personal relationships with Marc Cohodes or his friends, and in some cases, with Cohodes’ family members.

I questioned how these reporters can be expected to do their jobs when these relationships exist between them and those they are supposed to be covering. I also pointed out that no political reporter would dare be “friends” (Facebook or otherwise) with an elected official he or she was tasked with covering, for that would inevitably cloud their journalistic integrity.

I’m not the only one who sees the world this way. Recently, judges and attorneys in Florida were prohibited from being Facebook friends with one another, since “online ‘friendships’ could create the impression lawyers are in a position to influence judge friends.”

As for my video, never once did I refer to “naked short selling.”

Not once.

Nor did I use the word “conspiracy.”

Not once.

This is a simple case of supposedly objective business journalists and bloggers being too close to their subject, Marc Cohodes, and allowing the relationship to affect their reporting. Period.

Those who are claiming that I was painting a larger conspiratorial picture either didn’t watch the video, or are attempting to intentionally deceive their readers and cloud this issue. I’m not sure which is more shameful.

I should also point out that those who are claiming I was painting a larger conspiratorial picture are – not coincidentally – directly tied to Marc Cohodes or his friends. The resulting stab at journalism (in name only) is hardly a conspiracy; it’s human nature and in the case of these writers, very poor form and an even more poorly-kept secret.

In anticipation of this response (what could be more predictable?) I preemptively uploaded a spreadsheet documenting the extended – and publicly available – relationships connecting these folks, which I invited DeepCapture readers to examine in order to spot additional links which might explain still more instances of questionable journalism in support of bear raiding short sellers.

Some are trying to spin this as an “enemies list”, but as anybody who took the time to watch my video knows, that’s just a frantic attempt at damage control by a bunch of blushing writers.

Finally, I want to address the most unhinged reporting on this of all: that of Gary Weiss, a blogger initially hired to attack critics of illegal short selling on behalf of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation.

Of all the disjointed untruths Gary has spewed in our nearly four-year old battle, the best – or should I say the worst – came out today. Weiss writes:

I found that somebody — gee, I wonder who? — hacked into my Facebook account and uploaded photographs of “guilt-by-association” presentations Bagley has drawn up over the years, one of which was made the picture associated with my account. Now that ain’t legal either, obviously. And yes, I will prosecute.

Weiss, and all those who believe any of this (public) Facebook data was acquired via hacking, give me much more credit than I deserve. Cracking a site like Facebook would be just about impossible. No, there was no hacking. Some users might hide their friend lists from their profile page, but that doesn’t make them go away. If you want proof (and have a Facebook account) go ahead and peruse the not-so private Facebook friend lists of Gary Weiss, Sam Antar and Tracy Coenen.

But be warned: doing so will get you labeled a “hacker” by them.

As for this nonsense about hacking into his account in order to upload images to it: what Gary, a Facebook newbie who’s a little too quick to believe the first convenient notion that pops into his head, is probably seeing are images that somebody (not me nor anybody I know of) has uploaded to their own accounts and tagged with his name. These would appear under his photo tab in a section dedicated to “Photos of Gary”, which is distinct from whatever images he might upload. If that bothers him, Gary has the ability to un-tag himself from any user’s photos. If you need help with that Gary, just let me know. I’ll walk you through it.

But, consistent with his mandate, despite an easy explanation, Gary decided to take the libelous route, as have the usual members of his entourage.

I only hope their apologies are published at least as prominently.

(Those of you who enjoy reading about Gary Weiss’s sockpuppeting misadventues will take great joy at the post I intend to publish later today.)

Today, short-selling hedge fund Rocker Partners paid Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) $5-million to settle the lawsuit filed against them in August of 2005. Rocker Partners also entirely dropped its own countersuit.

Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne is a frequent contributor to DeepCapture.com.

This is a major victory, not only for Patrick and Overstock.com, but for all public companies targeted by bear raiding hedge funds.

But thanks to the unusually skewed reporting surrounding it, chances are you either hadn’t heard about the suit, or were under the impression it was frivolous and certain to fail.

This presentation explains part of the story behind the coverage of the suit, using some innovative methods to explain why what you heard about the suit and its merits likely had little in common with the reality of it.

As promised in the video, researchers are encouraged to find additional links within the Facebook friend lists of the short-selling hedge funds and journalists and bloggers who love them. To make the process easier, I’ve compiled this spreadsheet. If you discover anything interesting, particularly with respect to the hedge funds and reporters linked to other bear raid targets, please write about your findings it in the comment section below.

Also, very shortly I’ll be adding an interactive, dynamic relationship browser to this post, which will make it easy for you to visualize these networks.

 The stories behind the Rocker/Gradient lawsuit story [21:21m]:

Recently, I revealed a few details of a security flaw I had discovered on the Yahoo! message boards, which made it possible to determine a user’s IP address and username. This would have been nothing more than a curiosity but for the fact that, as we’ve documented many times on DeepCapture.com, stock message boards are among the preferred venues for short selling hedge funds seeking to spread disinformation about targeted companies and — often — opponents of short-side stock manipulation.

As I wrote, a few months ago, I used this security flaw to determine an IP address frequently used by Gary Weiss, who, prior to being repeatedly outted by yours truly, was among the most active, anonymous spreaders of such disinformation on stock  message boards, blogs, and Wikipedia. With this information, I was able to prove that Weiss was again engaging in pro-naked short selling sockpuppetry, this time on political blog DailyKos.com (a claim DailyKos.com later verified).

Cade Metz, a reporter for the prominent British tech publication The Register, took note of the above-referenced security flaw, and wrote a very in-depth piece on it and the part it’s played in Weiss’s latest trip-up, in addition to examining the way this fight has so starkly turned in our favor as of late.

Take a look at Cade’s piece and, if you like it, be sure to Digg it here.

Two things:

First, I highly recommend making a habit of listening to NPR’s Planet Money podcast. I’ve been listening for nearly a year (the entire length of its existence) and find the benefits innumerable. If you’re not familiar with podcasting, it’s basically an easy way to have audio content automatically downloaded to your computer or mp3 player as it’s released. That means you don’t need to go looking for it. It’s just there, waiting for you to consume at your convenience.

Planet Money publishes a new episode every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening. The typical 20 minute edition focuses on some aspect of economics, more often than not related to the present financial crisis, and usually incorporating an interview with somebody fascinating.

Which brings me to thing #2…

The most recent episode of Planet Money includes an interview with Sam Antar, a convicted stock manipulator and known associate of now-defunct short selling hedge fund Copper River Partners (née Rocker Partners) and Gradient Analytics (née Camelback Research). In total fairness, Sam’s interview, which focuses on the crime he enabled as CFO of Crazy Eddie) is very interesting, although I’d say that’s more a reflection on the skill of the interviewers than on Sam himself.

At the conclusion of the interview, hosts Adam Davidson and David Kestenbaum wonder aloud whether Sam Antar is to be trusted.

In response, I added a comment to the segment’s accompanying blog portion, pointing out that in my opinion, Sam Antar remains in the stock manipulation business as evidenced by his involvement in — and financing of — smear attacks on public companies (which go beyond claims of accounting fraud to include accusations of anti-Semitism, marital infidelity, substance abuse, and worse) led by short sellers hoping to profit from an expected drop in the target companies’ share price. In support of my claim, I included this link, which offers a clear example of just such an attack against a company called USANA: http://antisocialmedia.net/when-youre-right-youre-right/

Well, typical of how Sam and his buddy Gary Weiss operate, they reported my comment as “inappropriate” and managed to get it removed (twice).

If you agree that the world could benefit from additional context when deciding whether to trust Sam Antar, you might consider making that clear by adding your own comment here.

If you fail to find entertainment value in seeing illegal naked short selling proponent Gary Weiss publicly caught telling irresponsible lies, then you may consider this post optional and stop reading now.

Gary Weiss wonders how he managed to get caught sockpuppeting...again.

On the other hand, if you – like me – do enjoy seeing Weiss ensnared in the traps he’s haphazardly laid for others, you’ll appreciate what follows.

Earlier, I wrote about how I successfully confirmed my suspicion that Gary Weiss had spawned a new pro-illegal naked short selling sockpuppet in the form of Daily Kos blogger “Tom Sykes”.

As expected, both Weiss and “Sykes” responded on their respective blogs with furious and indignant denials and repeated insistence that I was lying.

As it turns out, DeepCapture.com reader Andrew Perez also has a blog on Daily Kos (in addition to his contributions to The New Argument), and he took justifiable offense at the con Weiss was attempting to pull on Daily Kos readers, penning a particularly well-written overview of the situation. In that post’s comment section, “Sykes” went on the offensive, but soon began to bob and weave as Perez worked to pin him down.

The key moment in their exchange is summarized below (you can read it in full here):

Perez: Correct me if I’m wrong: you are Gary Weiss. If you take offense with me addressing you as Gary, will you please confirm or deny that you are Gary Weiss? I asked you to do so already and you ignored my request.

Sykes: No I’m not and I’m not going to engage with you anymore. I just read the comments that you made on Deep Capture before you marched over here like a good Soldier of Byrne to write your little smear piece. You are much more of a shill for that creep than I thought you were. You use his tactics, you have his values. You belong there, not here.

Perez and I separately contacted Daily Kos administrators with evidence proving they were being scammed by Gary Weiss. I didn’t hear back, but Perez did. Via email, a Daily Kos administrator told him: “Sykes has been banned based on my evaluation of the material you and others provided.”

We can officially and unambiguously add Tom Sykes to the long list of abusive sockpuppet identities Gary Weiss has unsuccessfully created to trick people into believing illegal naked short selling is somehow a good thing.

Apparently aware of the ruin that is his own reputation, Gary Weiss has taken to battling in favor of illegal stock market manipulation on political blog aggregator DailyKos.com, under the pseudonym “Tom Sykes”.

Weiss has a rich history of abusive sockpuppeting, mostly for the purpose of attacking those who advocate ending  illegal naked short selling. At one time, Weiss did this on behalf of the DTCC. Now, exactly who’s paying him is unknown, though it must be someone because the fellow has otherwise been unemployed since 2004 (apart from his less-than-lethargic book sales, the pittance in ad revenue generated by his all-but-mothballed blog, and his tiny handful of ostensibly paid pieces for Portfolio Magazine – a publication whose final coffin nail Weiss personally helped to drive).

And the trend continues up to this very day, with Weiss as Tom Sykes.

To anybody who has followed Weiss for any period of time and come to recognize his overly-ripe writing style, that he and Tom Sykes are one in the same is beyond obvious.

But the Deep Capture team adheres to a higher standard when making such claims with certainty, and so I shall now explain how I can do so now.

Among the many flaws on the Yahoo message boards is one which makes it possible, under specific circumstances, to embed any html code, up to and including javascript, on the site. This, in turn, makes it possible not only to capture the IP address from which a user is accessing the site, but also their Yahoo username.

In other words, one can tie a Yahoo username to a specific IP address, sans ambiguity.

Gary Weiss lives in Greenwich Village, NY, but in August of 2008 he bought a second home upstate (tellingly financed by the property owner, not a bank) in the tiny Sullivan County hamlet of Callicoon Center.

A few months ago, using the above-referenced method, I was able to determine that the Yahoo account belonging to user garyrweiss@verizon.net was accessing the web via IP address 74.64.81.92, which maps to within a few miles of Callicoon Center. Given the tininess of Callicoon Center, this is what one would expect of an instance of Weiss being online at his second home.

(Hint: remember that IP address, for we shall return to it shortly.)

We know that garyrweiss@verizon.net belongs to our Gary Weiss thanks to emails we’ve acquired between Weiss and kindred stock manipulator Floyd Schneider.

With the 15-part series on Dendreon recently completed, and our self-imposed hiatus from posting anything else ended, I decided it was time to prove once and for all that Gary Weiss and Tom Sykes are the same person.

It took a few short hours to hit paydirt.

In short, email sent to tomsykes.kos@gmail.com (the address Tom Sykes lists as his own on dailykos.com) induced the recipient to visit the Yahoo message boards in such a way as to reveal his IP address to me.

The result: 74.64.81.92.

This IP address has been conclusively linked to garyrweiss@verizon.net, which in turn has been conclusively linked to Gary R. Weiss, the bumbling sockpuppeteer and defender of illegal naked short selling.

But wait, there’s more.

Among Weiss’s most notable accomplishments has been epic sockpuppeting on Wikipedia in order to cover-up evidence of the damaging impact of illegal naked short selling. Once this finally came to light, Weiss and his home IP address range, which is well known, were unambiguously banned from editing Wikipedia.

But what about Weiss’s new IP address, tied to his new, second home?

Well, as we’d expect, realizing that it was unknown by Wikipedia administrators, Weiss used it, on two occasions, to remove references to Mark Mitchell’s Dendreon-related reporting on deepcapture.com, which had been previously added to the Wikipedia article on Michael Milken.  To see these edits for yourself, follow this link, which will show you the only two contributions made by IP address 74.64.81.92. To see the substance of the edits, click on the links that say “diff”. What you’ll then see is a before and after comparison, with the text in yellow being what 74.64.81.92 (Weiss) removed.

What could possibly be motivating Weiss to carry on in this manner?

I see one of two possibilities: either he’s like the 80-year-old Japanese soldier living in the jungles of Guam who refuses to accept that his “side” lost the war, or – as I suspect – he remains in active contact with his “side,” which remains mobilized and intent on subverting all that we’ve accomplished.

So what next?

Well, obviously, the editorial staff at dailykos.com will want to know that they’ve given forum to a deeply conflicted contributor who – beyond simply using a pseudonym – is actively pretending not to be Gary Weiss by referring to Weiss in the third person and linking to his own blog as though it were actually really relevant. You can let them know what we’ve discovered about Mr. Sykes by going here.

In addition, any active Wikipedians among you will probably want to make it known there that 74.64.81.92 is in fact the dread sockpuppet Mantanmoreland/Gary Weiss.

Finally, I’d simply suggest the Deep Capture community understand that there are many who are actively working – usually anonymously – to discredit the market reform movement. I encourage you to seek out and bring instances of such to our attention, so that we can investigate further when warranted, in order to better understand their real motives.

And as a postscript, I wish to thank Gary Weiss for being so very predictable. His consistently reptilian-brain-based responses to my occasional prodding has made this aspect of my job not only productive, but very enjoyable, as well.

UPDATE: Both Tom Sykes and Gary Weiss are “separately” expressing outrage at this situation tonight. I encourage each of you to make use of “their” blogs’ comment functions to let “them” know what you think about how “they” have been lying to you.

Note: I have the privilege of being a contributor on an upstart blog where some extremely intelligent criticism of Web 2.0 is taking place. It’s called Akahele.org, and I recommend adding it to your RSS reader.

Akahele, if you’re curious, is a Hawaiian word meaning “slow” or “deliberate”, in contrast with wiki, the Hawaiian word for “fast” (and the origin of the “wiki” in Wikipedia).

The following is my most recent contribution to Akahele, and is an examination of the Wikipedia/Gary Weiss saga, with a new twist.

My direct involvement notwithstanding, I feel it’s both fair and accurate to say that the events surrounding the Gary Weiss/Mantanmoreland affair were among the strangest and most polarizing in Wikipedia’s history.

For those lucky enough to have no idea what I’m referring to, here’s the highest of high-level summations (much more in-depth explanations can be found here and here):

Gary Weiss

Former business journalist Gary Weiss used multiple sockpuppet accounts to ingratiate himself with Wikipedia’s inner circle and – thanks primarily to the relationships he established there – gain control of, most notably, the article describing an illegal form of stock market manipulation known as naked short selling.

Weiss then proceeded to dramatically alter the content of this and related articles in order to minimize the perceived negative impact of naked short selling while marginalizing critics of the practice, myself included.

There’s strong evidence suggesting Weiss was paid to do this by the very organization many fault as the primary enabler, not to mention a financial beneficiary of, illegal naked short selling.

I suspect most would agree with my assessment that among the darkest moments in the more than two-year drama between Weiss’s arrival and eventual forced departure were those in which Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales injected himself into the controversy – always seemingly uninvited – and always with the effect of derailing whatever progress might have been made toward bringing about Weiss’s removal.

Among these, the most incomprehensible episode occurred at the crescendo of what is widely regarded the largest and most thorough sockpuppeting investigation in the history of Wikipedia, in which dozens of volunteers dedicated hundreds of hours amassing a body of evidence overwhelmingly implicating Weiss in a deeply disturbing deception.

It was at that time that Wales posted an unprovoked indictment of the process under the heading ‘I have personally seen no persuasive evidence’, resulting in Weiss getting another pass. This, despite Wales having told others, privately, that he knew Weiss was guilty; and many more, publicly, that I was a liar for making the same claim.

What follows is my best explanation for Jimbo’s odd behavior.

But first, I need to explain a little more about the nature of short selling, both legal and illegal.

Legal short selling involves selling borrowed shares with the expectation of buying them back and returning them to their owner at a later date and a lower price, allowing the short seller to pocket the difference.

Naked short sellers, on the other hand, sell shares short without borrowing them first, thereby creating the equivalent of counterfeit shares. This has the effect of artificially swelling the supply of stock, which has a markedly depressive influence on price, making the naked short seller rich, while inflicting immense harm upon legitimate shareholders and the companies in which they’ve invested.

There have been, in theory, rules intended to prevent naked short sales from occurring, or at least, from enduring longer than 13 trading days. Unfortunately, the people behind the practice are quite smart, and the monetary incentive to violate the law quite large.

In other words, they’ve found a path around the rules.

And that path runs right through the heart of Chicago’s financial district.

As it turns out, there is a law, known as the “options market maker exemption”, which permits certain brokerages, specifically those registered as ‘options market makers’, to engage in a highly-controlled form of naked short selling in the course of bona fide options market making – comparable to the permission police officers have to exceed the speed limit under certain extreme circumstances when it’s in everybody’s best interest that they do so.

Naked short sellers have discovered that they can essentially “rent” the options market maker exemption from certain corrupt options market makers, producing massive amounts of counterfeit shares in the process.

It’s as though a corrupt cop rented his police cruiser to a random citizen so he or she could drive it around at 120 mph for a day, without being held responsible for any of the damage they might cause.

Of course, it’s silly to think that either the citizen or the cop could get away this, but in the financial world, such overt violations of the law regularly take place on a grand scale. And though the reason is not immediately clear, research proves that this abuse of the options market maker exemption nearly always takes place on the Chicago Stock Exchange.

Why Chicago?

My guess is that it’s a cultural thing: the same way you’d never even think of bribing a cop who pulled you over in San Diego, while doing the same just 30 miles south in Tijuana is not a big deal.

What does this have to do with Jimbo Wales?

Well it turns out that both he and former Wikimedia Foundation trustee Michael Davis used to work at Chicago Options Associates, where Wales was a research director and Davis was CEO.

To be clear, while it existed, Chicago Options Associates traded options and futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and was not an options market maker. But because I suspect the Chicago phenomenon is a cultural one, and given the near certainty that Wales counts many equities options market making traders as his friends, I’m not sure it really matters: his professional background is deeply rooted in the same dark corner of the financial world that facilitates the same form of stock fraud Gary Weiss worked so hard to defend on Wikipedia.

Which I suspect explains why Jimbo Wales worked so hard to defend Gary Weiss.

Is Jimbo Wales above influencing Wikipedia content based on his personal relationships?

Rachel Marsden would probably say that no, he is not.

I recently asked Jimbo whether anybody with ties to options market making on the Chicago Stock Exchange sought to influence his decisions in this respect, and was not entirely surprised when Jimbo insisted that they did not.

However I was surprised when Jimbo followed with “it is still to this day completely unproven that the claims you’ve made about Mantanmoreland being Gary Weiss are true.”

Once I’d picked myself up off the floor, I decided to take Jimbo up on his invitation to finally show him the first bit of proof linking Gary Weiss to Mantanmoreland, despite the fact that doing so felt like proving to a skeptic that the moon is not composed of dairy products.

What I ultimately sent Wales were:

Click to enlarge.

1. A scatter graph (seen at right) showing Mantanmoreland’s Wikipedia editing pattern over several months, including a 12 hour time shift limited to the period in which Gary Weiss was known to be visiting India.
2. Email from Gary Weiss (if you want to know how I came to possess Weiss’s private email, read this) in which he told a friend that he intended to edit a specific Wikipedia article to include a reference to a book he wrote.
3. A link showing that Mantanmoreland did in fact edit that very article to include a reference to that very book.

I also made it clear that should these bits of evidence fail to convince him, I’m ready to send much, much more.

Maybe Jimbo was convinced and he decided there was no reason to respond further.

Maybe the evidence simply left him speechless.

Or maybe owning up to his reckless actions in this case would prove unpopular with his friends back in Chicago.

All I know is that once the evidence was sent as requested, the conversation went cold.

Whatever the case, the legacy of Gary Weiss’s campaign of misinformation endures on Wikipedia to this day, due in large part to the apartheid-like probationary status imposed upon the naked short selling article after Wales condemned the inquest into Weiss’s activities as having produced no persuasive evidence.

All the while, Wikipedia remains the first option offered those searching the web for information about naked shorting, and its role in the current financial crisis.

Weiss may have created this problem, but Jimbo Wales — whatever his motivation — has allowed it to persist. The time has come for Wales himself to step in, help find a real solution, and acknowledge the damage this dark episode has caused real people in the process.