Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? That article is amazing, and I think the title reflects it.
Blatant penny stock scams /= "a $35 billion stock"
...hence the halting on manipulation concerns
The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.
31–40 of 143 posts
Re: The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.
#32Trading 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?
Very helpful explanation from a thread about this on reddit (narrated from the first person perspective of the scammer):
It's pretty beautiful in an illegal sort of way: So the clever short sellers borrow and sell 100,000 shares of stock at $2 each, hoping to profit when it crashes to zero.
By hypothesis, there are no buyers. But we buy. We buy those 100,000 shares for $2 each, laying out $200,000. Now we own 300.1 million shares, out of 300 million outstanding.
On Thursday we go to our brokers and say "you know what, we changed our minds, we want our stock back from whoever you loaned it to."
So the brokers call in the short sales.
The short sellers can't borrow the stock anywhere else. We own it all. So they have to close out their short sales by buying in the stock.
But they can't buy the stock anywhere else either. We own it all. So they have to buy it from us. How much do we charge?
Yeah, $15. Or $20 or whatever, I don't know. We can charge whatever we want. If the short sellers don't buy the stock, they're breaking the law. So they'll pay whatever we ask.
They pay $20 to buy back the shares they sold us at $2, making us a $1.8 million profit.
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/4wvlkv/a_scam_wi...
[edit: formatting]
Re: The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://neuromama.com/get/web/WTF I am entirely unsure how this search engine works.
I got an error while searching which contains a Laravel stack trace, in case anyone is curious what a small snapshot of their stack looks like: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/efa644da4f2713b...
We may have overloaded it by mentioning it on HN. Previously, the only users were probably the investors trying it out.
Re: The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a PHP application proxying Google search results based on the errors and results.
On my stock Android phone, all the searches just return blank pages. Are you saying it actually works on non-mobile clients?
Yes, it's a Laravel PHP application just as dangrossman said. It simply fetches the Google search URL based on your query and returns the results [0].
As you can see, it's returning a Laravel exception, displaying the Google Captcha check HTML code to avoid this type of thing.
Re: The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.
#35For comedic gold visit http://investor.neuromama.com/
I feel like it's funniest website I seen in last couple of years. Probably they just too late for the Fools Day.
Re: The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.
#36$35 billion market cap, but it looks like the daily volume is never more than ~$200,000...
Re: The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.
#37[deleted]
Re: The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.
#38Trading 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?
Very helpful explanation from a thread about this on reddit (narrated from the first person perspective of the scammer): It's pretty beautiful in an illegal sort of way: So the clever short sellers borrow and sell 100,000 shares of stock at $2 each, hoping to profit when it crashes to zero. By hypothesis, there are no buyers. But we buy. We buy those 100,000 shares for $2 each, laying out $200,000. Now we own 300.1 m…
This sounds pretty amazing but I can't figure out bindings for all the pronouns.
Who are the short sellers? Who are the brokers? are they complicit? Is one of them acting as the market maker for the stock? When the con is exploded and the money gets paid back, where did it come from? The short sellers? the brokers? thin air?
Re: The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.
#39Who buys this sort of stock? Are there really enough people to make the valuation that high?
Re: The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.
#40Read the (Important Disclosure) pdf at the bottom of http://investor.neuromama.com/ - It's amazingly crazy.
Here: http://investor.neuromama.com/uploads/2/4/6/9/24695823/impor...
It's a 68 page, haphazardly stitched mess of documents. Can't say they're not confident in their product:
From page 37: "NeuroBrowser of NeuroMama.com is the best, easiest to use, and blocks all kind of viruses and pop-outs on your screen...In 2 years the NeuroMama stock will be the most popular and will make NeuroMama shareholders and employees very, very rich. NeuroMama.com is the best Search Engine in the world."