There's no question that Mr. Bordynuik knew he was
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Penny stock investors who didn't question whether Mr. Bordynuik might be a fraudster or not, dutifully plugged his fake numbers into their spreadsheets and imagined those enormous returns. Those spreadsheets popped onto the message boards constantly. The stock soared with a low effective float to a market cap of about half a billion dollars.
Mr. Bordynuik, for his part, decided to take his pay and large benefits entirely in generous amounts of cold hard cash out of invested funds while he was leading investors to believe those 2,500 sites would translate to about $80/share or so in annual earnings. He 'altruistically' returned shares to the company, for which his trusting investors loved him. Mr. Bordynuik seemed to place zero value on keeping shares for himself. At his first opportunity, somewhere around $1.40/share or so, Mr. Bordynuik dumped 800,000 shares onto his loyal investors' heads.
In the absence of real information from the company, over the course of years investors eventually started to realize that the data in their spreadsheets was fake and the stock naturally took a beating. However instead of blaming the swindler who engineered the scam, they blame "colluding entities" for their woes. So that's where we're at.