Attorney Kenneth Eade filed a lawsuit yesterday against Investorshub.com, Inc. and several John Doe defendants for libel in the federal Central District Court of California in Los Angeles, Case No. CV11-01315 PA. The complaint, which requests $400 million in damages, alleges that Investorshub.com, Inc. is run by Matthew Brown, a serial stock manipulator and convicted securities fraudster, who sold the company to ADVFN, PLC and still manages its administration, that Investors Hub hires individuals to post on their bulletin boards under aliases to either post positive comments to promote a stock they seek to manipulate and encourage trading in, or to post negative comments on a stock they seek to manipulate down in price to protect short positions of their clients. It further alleges that Investors Hub inserts meta tags into the postings, which result in links to the posts being picked up in the top 10 word searches on Google and Yahoo. It alleges that Investors Hub protects and will not divulge the true identity of any alias, and that each bulletin board is supervised by a moderator, who has the power to edit and remove any post made by any alias poster, subject to the permission of Investors Hub, who also has administrators who post their alias names in conjunction with the moniker, “ADMIN.” The lawsuit alleges that the primary role of these ADMIN posters are to eliminate messages that are contrary to Investors Hub's agenda, and that any post expressing any adverse point of view to the one desired by Investors Hub is removed, whether it violates Investors Hub's terms of service or not, and that anybody posting messages contrary to that agenda will be temporarily or permanently banned from posting on its site, and all such messages will be removed.
The lawsuit charges Investors Hub and several alias posters with publishing false libelous statements about Eade, which were distributed throughout the Internet on other web sites and on the search engines “Google” and “Yahoo,” and which injured Eade in his professional and personal reputation, charging him with being a criminal, being a thief, having engaged in securities frauds and scams, having engaged in illegal actions and being dishonest as a securities lawyer. It alleges that Investors Hub participated in the development and creation of the libelous publications and the elimination of any contrary points of view, as an Internet content provider in addition to being a service provider, thus coming within the exception to immunity under the Communications Decency Act.
