For a look inside the crazy but increasingly contentious world of Internet chat rooms and stock trading read an excerpt from John R. Emshswiller's book, "Scam Dogs and Mo-Mo Mamas: Inside the Wild and Woolly World of Internet Stock Trading."
On April 1, 1999, the Business Wire news-release service carried an eye-popping announcement from WebNode.com. WebNode, the release boasted, had been granted an exclusive contract by the U.S. government to raise $4 billion by selling 40 million "nodes" on a "new countrywide state-of-the-art fiber optic Next Generation Internet to replace the existing copper backbone." Its motto: "Don't just use the Internet ... Own It!"
[Scam Dogs Jacket]
The reaction was swift. More than 1,000 people responded with e-mail expressing interest in the company and its offering. But there was a problem: WebNode was an April Fool's hoax.
For Janice Shell, one of the fertile imaginations behind the prank, part of the idea had been to educate and warn investors about the outlandish claims made by some real companies selling stock to unwitting investors. She and her online pals had also been looking for laughs.
Business Wire wasn't amused, however. In a suit filed in federal court in San Francisco, it accused Ms. Shell and her accomplices of fraud, trademark infringement, defamation, breach of contract and conspiracy. The two sides eventually settled, with one of Ms. Shell's co-defendant's homeowner's policy paying Business Wire $27,500.
Janice Shell was outraged at what she saw as the absurdity of being hauled into court over a prank like WebNode when so many real rip-offs fleece investors daily. "Gross misrepresentation in the name of fraud is apparently excusable, but an April Fool's parody must not go unpunished," she wrote in one e-mail.
Ms. Shell is one of a scattered legion of colorful characters -- many with some special interest to promote or ax to grind -- who have come to populate the financial byways of cyberspace. People who go by online names like Big Dog, Cavalry, Ga Bard, Icabod, Zorro, Truthseeker, and Tokyo Joe.
[Janice Shell]
Janice Shell's online odyssey: Lionized, vilified -- and searched for on two continents
Fans have lauded Ms. Shell and her online cohorts as citizen cybercops, who were helping to clean up a very dirty landscape in the often-bizarre online-discussion world. Detractors have lambasted them as cyberterrorists, who were trying to enrich themselves -- and shadowy foreign stock-trading allies -- by destroying the market values of legitimate companies.
But as the WebNode incident suggests, the Internet stock-trading world changed during the late 1990s. With more and more people trolling the Web in hopes of scoring big on the next new thing, with stock prices soaring or plummeting in seeming cyberseconds, it was getting harder for anyone to keep a sense of humor. The dollar amounts at stake quickly became so big that probing questions often generated nasty potshots, or worse. For all the giddiness and excitements that online trading had brought, the Net was becoming a tougher and, in ways, uglier place.
"Please keep away from my stocks," warned one e-mail message received by Ms. Shell. "You will be kill very sonn........ someone will found your body at street very soon." Another proclaimed: "If the day ever comes when you are lying in a coma, I would be only too honored to pull the plug and spit upon your wretched bones."
Like many others, Ms. Shell came to online stock commentary in a roundabout way. Born in Kansas City in 1948, she earned a doctorate in art history from New York University, sailed to Europe on a freighter and settled in Milan, Italy. After losing a bundle on technology stocks, she got bit by the online bug in 1996 and quickly connected with a growing band of likeminded people. They shared a sense of humor and a sense of outrage about some of the things happening in the stock market, especially in the raucous market for small-company stocks. Together, they roamed the Internet stock chat rooms, pulling off online jokes and tormenting little companies that they believed deserved it.
By the beginning of this year, Ms. Shell had posted some 25,000 messages on Silicon Investor, a popular Internet stock-discussion operation, and thousands more elsewhere. Other people had even started message boards to discuss Ms. Shell. One writer suggested creating a fund to "buy her a life."
For all the online hours, Ms. Shell insists she made absolutely no money from her efforts and never traded in the stocks she criticized. But her online critics didn't believe her for a nanosecond. Nobody, critics reasoned, could spend so much time online without compensation. "ARE THEY BEING PAID TO INVADE THREADS?" wrote one message-board player.
Terms of Chatdom
DD: Due Diligence, aka research. Best done before you say bye bye to your money.
EOM: End of Message. Three letters that often seem to come out not soon enough.
Flame: To attack or uncover the dastardly deeds of someone. Always, of course, done with the purest of motives -- unless done by an evil basher or unscrupulous hypester.
FWIW: For what it's worth. Often less than the writer thinks.
LOL: Laughing Out Loud. A longer version -- contributed byt Janice Shell, student of the Italian Renaissance -- is Lololololololissimo!
Lurker: Someone who reads the postings on an Internet message board but doesn't write any.
Mo-Mo Mama: Refers to a stock that is quicky rising due to the exitement among stock traders, sometimes triggered by news, Internet chatter, disinformation and sometimes by the need to be excited about something. Since mo-mo mamas often move faster than the average speeding stock trader, it is easy to buy just in time to watch the price fall. Chasing mo-mo mamas can leave you a po-po papa.
Newbie: A newcomer to the Internet stock-trading world. Suitable for being abused by upperclassmen.
PTG&LI: Playing the game and loving it.
Pump & Dump: The art of convincing others that a stock is a great investment and then selling your shares when the fools buy.
Scam Dog: A stock that combines the qualities of a "scam" and a "dog," being at worst a fraud and at best overvalued and headed for a fall.
SOHF: Sense of Humor Failure. A too often undiagnosed disease that was carried from the Old World to the Net.
A "thread" is online lingo for a particular discussion site, usually devoted to a specific topic. Indeed, the Internet world of Ms. Shell and her fellow travelers, like many frontiers, has evolved its own terminology. There, a "lurker," by definition, can't "lol." But a "scam dog" could be a "mo-mo mama."
In this freewheeling environment, Ms. Shell hooked up with Jeffrey S. Mitchell, a software designer from Westport, Conn. In 1997, he created a fake company, TechniClone Inc., and started a Silicon Investor chat group about it. TechniClone had supposedly been granted a patent for the first "neural network" computer chip using "blastomere separation." Mr. Mitchell labeled the company "the next Intel." (Mr. Mitchell's make-believe firm had no connection to Techniclone Corp., a real company in Tustin, Calif.)
It was a modest prank. For one thing, he posted messages in other chat groups revealing the joke and inviting others to take part. In the spirit of the prank, Ms. Shell abandoned all inclinations toward cynicism and urged everyone to "BUY BUY BUY!!!!!"
From working together on an absurdly fake stock, it wasn't such a big leap for Ms. Shell and Mr. Mitchell to start working together on stocks they viewed as simply absurd.
An early target was Houston-based Cryogenic Solutions. An initial Cryogenic Solutions business was supposed to be preserving aborted fetuses for up to..
