"He left prison in August 2010 after being sentenced for five years for defrauding investors, in a $1.8 million scheme through misrepresentations tied to the renovation of a Las Vegas casino. The Ukrainian immigrant was sued by the SEC in the 1990s for orchestrating a $12 million penny stock scam. He was ordered to pay more than $21.6 million in disgorgement and penalties for selling unregistered securities from 1993 to 1996."
Why isn't this guy on the bad actors list?
With the apparent gold mine of batshit footage[0][1][2][∞], horrifying failed PR stunts[4], pdfs[5], and fake products, I really, really, hope someone with the right skills picks up the documentary ball here...
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok-8uVR4Pa0
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZhI5zRJ8zw
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hreCQlJB7bE
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23C_fKGuSls
[4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1rbxisJGJ4
[5] - https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=&bih=&q=site%3...
[∞] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbSwch2hCQcgy-ecz1Z_guQ
edit: spacing
> The SEC has pushed to keep shell companies out of the hands of fraudsters, who manipulate their shares to make illegal profits through a so-called pump-and-dump scheme.
So if you wondered what a shell company is, one way to get a publicly traded company is to buy the "shell" of an existing company that is already public but wound down operations.
Sort of a take over of just the name, incorporation documents and exchange documents that let it list. You'd then delist and have your shares only trade OTC. This helps explain why they haven't filed any financials for the past few years.
If you look at its trading history, NERO US Equity<HP GO> if you have a Bloomberg terminal, you can see that it traded a few hundred shares a day and slowly climbed up each day. This probably indicates that the shares are very tightly held. So the owners can't really cash out by selling their shares, but they can possibly use the shares as collateral.
Being so tightly held also eliminates the possibility of shorting the company, though shorting any OTC symbol is always a bit sketchy.
For comedic gold visit http://investor.neuromama.com/
What is this[1]?!
"To fully understand the difference between our Business Opportunity ad and all the other business opportunity ads you've been reading, the first thing you must know is that we are offering an overflowing profit palette of business 'opportunities', not just a single business 'opportunity.'..."
Plus 30 more paragraphs of similar madness.
[1] http://investor.neuromama.com/licensing-territories.html
I found this on the "Special Password Protected Area for Original Baja California Investors" page:
> Why would it make sense for APPLE Computers to acquire NeuroMama, Ltd.
> (1) If APPLE acquired NeuroMama, Ltd. it could potentially generate $100 billion, by selling advertising, in new revenues per year within 5 years by replacing GOOGLE with Neuromama.com’s Search Engine based on Neural Technology in APPLE's browser - SAFARI. Of course, it no longer will be NeuroMama.com search engine .... it will be APPLE Search Engine.
...what?
(Sorry bout this folks - just trying to wrap my head around it)
What we seem to know and the unanswered questions:
- this seems to be an atrociously bad startup (their "search engine" proxies Google but can be easily tripped)
- it seems to have been a genuine IPO (2000???) that then failed (see search engine) and yet the outstanding shares trade OTC (between large institutions privately - a very common method)
- the scam that seems to be happening is curious (See good explanation about Eve down thread). The idea is bad scammers can trap genuine hedge funds into a short squeeze on this very rarely traded stock. But no sane hedge fund will short the stock without also buying a call option - and so it seems only insane hedge funds get ripped off here.
My questions:
Why on earth are these stocks still lying around and being traded OTC. This seems the sort of thing that would never get allowed on any genuine exchange (the company could barely fulfill minimum reporting requirements)
Why did anyone take this as a "naked short"? Options trading is risk risk risk and people do this for a living aren't fools. Are they?
Even if this got public in the dotcom boom, why is such a scammy company still allowed to operate with outstanding shares ? I mean they have only just halted trading on a company that proxies Google ... Why give the imprimatur of SEC over the past few years to such crap?
All their website does is scrape Google and return the results. I found this by causing an error by accident which shockingly exposes this error page: (http://i.imgur.com/w0tgNUA.png)
Why on earth does NASDAQ make it look so much like Neuromama (NERO) is a real NASDAQ-listed company? If I was trying to fool investors, this is the link I would use:
The Business Insider headline (original, and yes Business Insider is terrible) from today was quite funny.
"This $35 billion company supposedly owns 'a clone of Amazon’ and is developing atomic fusion — and the SEC thinks something might be wrong."
This makes no sense...OTC stocks are almost never bigger than a billion dollars. This used to be at $28 in 2012, which meant is was still worth over $20 billion but the SEC didn;t notice then. No information about this company. not even a wiki page. I think the $35 billion may be a typo and it's only $35 million. There is something missing in the reporting. Maybe it traded at a penny and went to $55 ,maybe it wound be worth billions but it never got lower than $10
Read the (Important Disclosure) pdf at the bottom of http://investor.neuromama.com/ - It's amazingly crazy.
Wow - They don't even bother actually building a realistic-looking product. Their NeuroMama search engine doesn't seem to work at all and it has pictures of (Russian-looking) priests and clowns in the background.
I think this is pretty much like gambling though... Not so different from how most people deal with the NYSE or NASDAQ (most people know nothing and make decisions based entirely on hype/media). People gamble on horses and lottery, and they also gamble on stocks... I think if someone can pull this off, they deserve the money as much as any legitimate company on the NASDAQ or NYSE.
A lot of these NASDAQ/NYSE companies have overinflated valuations (far beyond their real intrinsic value); it's the same thing except in this case, the intrinsic value is 0.
Who honestly believes this company is worth anywhere near $35B?
Tiajuana, Mexico? Siberia? Sounds like the makings for a 'Red Dawn 2: Putin and El Chapo" where Trump is holed up with the NRA as patriotic rebels protecting Hillary, the POTUS ;)
The 2012 film remake of Red Dawn made China the bad guys compared with 1984 original Red Dawn where Russia and Cuba were the bad guys.
But seriously, could this be used to launder money, or the scam wouldn't allow for it based upon the setup of the short squeeze? Could money be put in the system this way and cleaned and turn a profit at the same time?
NeuroMama, LTD. is a development stage company which designs and implements the Internet Platform containing all of the popular components used by majority of population. NeuroPlatform offers its users more search relevancy, privacy and FSR - Frequent Search Rewards. NeuroPlatform consists of NeuroMama.com search engine, based on Neural Technology (Artificial Intelligence), secure e-mail service - Neuro-Mail, NeuroBrowser with a special version for children, NeuroMania social network with multitude of features such as Video management system, marketplace and auction, TviMama.com Video On-Demand and Live Broadcasting Infrastructure, functioning as the next generation Internet Content Distribution Platform (CDP). The NeuroZone online shopping mall is in implementation stage that will offer its users and vendors unique online shopping experiences, provide its e-commerce merchants with ability for instant integration to NeuroZone platform, and reward users for shopping at NeuroZone merchants. The flagship store for NeuroZone will be NeuroMania Department Store with large variety of products sold under the NeuroBrand such as NeuroPad, NeuroPhone, NeuroBook, etc. The company is currently in the process of establishing its presence in China to sell advertising and to establish Joint Ventures with manufacturers in China in order to deliver large profit margins in NeuroMania online store and brick and mortar store locations as part of its licensing program. NeuroMama, Ltd. is in the process of researching, designing and implementing its licensing program to accelerate growth of revenues worldwide. NeuroMama, Ltd. is currently implementing revenue generating infrastructure to sell advertising on its Internet Platform.
I trade this market professionally, and it is quite easy to massively elevate your stock price if you control most of the floating shares. These sorts of price run-ups happen very regularly, but, to their credit, the SEC normally stops them before they get this far. They are typically able to halt trading by the time it's worth a billion dollars, two tops. :/
TL;DR (DontRead)
Some con artist gets expelled from US after spending 6 years in prison for investment fraud. Tries new pump and dump gig from Mexico called NeuroMama, deliberately hilariously crazy stupid.
Issues some 650M shares, sells 200 for 50$, probably to himself, gets stopped by SEC. Holds the remaining 650M-200 shares, that's where the trillion dollar figure comes from.
Time to stop calling virtual shares 'market cap' or even 'worth'!
That's pretty old and boring, the 'new' attempted twist is called short squeeze, see and thank @thegranderson for explanation.
Shun the Neuromama meme.
This gives a whole new dimension to the word 'pump and dump con artist': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1rbxisJGJ4
I got very nice error from their search engine, revealing a bit where they get results from :)
WHY WOULD THEY JUST SUSPEND THE STOCK TRADING, WHAT IS THE ILEGALITY HERE? THAT THEIR STOCK TRADES AT $56DLLS AND THEY HAVE LOW VOLUME? OR THAT THEY HAVE NOT FILED THEIR FINANCIAL DOCUMENTS? I HAVE READ ON ONE OF THEIR CONTRACTS THAT THEY PERFECTLY STATE THAT THEIR COMPANIE USES INVESTORS CAPITAL SEED TO FUND PROJECTS. WELL LETS JUST WAIT AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS ON THE 26TH OF THIS MONTH
That "search engine" looks like it was never really build to be used. I searched the term "blender" and got this:
`ErrorException in getResults.php line 45:`
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_i...
This forum post has links to some of their financials which are just comical.
$35 billion market cap, but it looks like the daily volume is never more than ~$200,000...
Screenshot of a search for "8 billion" on neuromama.com http://imgur.com/a/Y1Ior
>To read more about the saga of Cynk, click here.
...with no link to click on
This is like watching a flaming dumpster fire.
Bloomberg's headlines are infuriatingly clickbaity these days.
If anyone wants the real story, let me know. I know exactly what this group is into.
Who buys this sort of stock? Are there really enough people to make the valuation that high?
Trading was just halted in Neuromama (OTC:NERO), a startup with a $35 billion market cap. They have a search engine (https://neuromama.com/), a social network (http://vica.life/), and claim "heavy ion fusion" and oceanfront property in Mexico. The CEO got out of prison 6 years ago.
WTF?