Gary Weiss and his Yahoo Gnomes
What brought me into this fight in a public way was the discovery that Gary Weiss was posting to the Yahoo Finance message board as “Lamborghini751″.
I figured this out, initially, by figuring out that Gary was commenting on his own blog as “Lamborghini751″.
In response, Weiss swore that indeed, he had posted Lamborghini751’s comments, but that it had been at Lambo’s request.
Apparently it was easier for Lambo to email the comments to Weiss than to actually post them himself.
(snicker)
At the time, Weiss took the additional step of swearing that he’d never actually posted anything to Yahoo Finance.
Well…let’s see what his email to Floyd Schneider has to say on the matter.
(Read this to learn how I came to posses email between Gary Weiss and Floyd Schneider).
On February 17, 2006, Floyd sent Gary Weiss a link to a story relating to securities fraud. For some reason, this prompted the following reply from Gary:
From: garyrweiss@verizon.net
To: Floyd3491@aol.com
Subject: Re: Each year, Americans lose an estimated $40 billion to securities fraud
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 11:16:24 -0500
Received: from unknown (HELO maincomputer) (garyrweiss@verizon.net@70.23.27.10 with login) by smtp102.vzn.mail.dcn.yahoo.com with SMTP; 17 Feb 2006 16:16:28 -0000
—————
Excellent! Reminds me to transfer my google alerts over to my new Verizon account.
One damn thing about Verizon is that it has prevented my gnomes from posting on the Yahoo boards! The link is sometimes down for hours on end.
Any guesses as to what Weiss means when he refers to his “gnomes”?
As it happens, I know precisely who Weiss’s gnomes were. But the point is, unless Weiss employs faerie-world creatures to do his dirty work for him, he was lying when he claimed that he never posted anything to Yahoo Finance.
Posted in AntiSocialMedia with Judd Bagley |
July 14th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Excellent work Judd! I support you guys completely. I was new to the boards and spent a lot of time reading. I can see the “naked shorting” model being played out in quite a number of stocks.
My question to you is: are gnomes a reference to other posters, or pseudonyms?
July 15th, 2008 at 8:55 am
This stuff you guys are writting will make an excellent movie one day. Thank you for sharing it with us and for working so hard to figure it all out.
July 15th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Shock and Awe,
Considering in that email Gary Weiss is complaining that his home internet service provider often makes Yahoo inaccessible for hours at a time, it would appear he’s talking about his own Yahoo pseudonyms.
It’s certainly Gary’s right to post anything he wants to Yahoo’s message boards, using whatever name he wishes. But given his strenuous denials of ever having done so, his email comment offers yet another unique insight into the character of the man.
July 15th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Yeah it’s interesting that the use of the word gnomes is being repeated on other boards. EMKR is a stock that is clearly being naked shorted. There is a poster in there stockin8tur having an ongoing and useless discussion with charybdis_and_scylla and they constantly refer to “gnomes” when they refer to buyers and “gophers” when they refer to sellers. Perhaps instead of buyers and sellers they mean players on the long side and players on the short side. Players being posters, analysts, bloggers, traders, fund managers. Who knows.
Any thoughts, or have you seen this elsewhere?
And by the way, what did you think of the comments on the hill today regarding “naked shorting”. CNBC’s Erin Burnett and someone she was talking to were mocking Cox’s statement that somehow now the “naked shorting” would be “really really illegal” as apposed to just illegal. Smug, and ironic, since they never seem to admit it exists much less is illegal. Just wondering what you guys thought.
September 4th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
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September 5th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
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