On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Jones Beene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote: > > GOW has apparently learned from experience that selling stock in worthless companies is much lower risk than selling products you can’t deliver. “Capitalism” protects the “pump and dumper” pretty well - but not the guy who takes deposits and does not ship product.
Right. But in the US, pump and dump scams get caught too. It's that the punishment is often limited to a stop and desist order and "disgorgement" of the ill gotten funds. The problem with that last item is that the scammers have often spent or hidden the money by the time the order comes out. One recent example of a pump and dump that got caught is Sniffex -- a company which sold dowsing rods as explosive detectors and perpetrated a $6 million fraud in the US. A stop and disgorge settlement was reached in a case brought by the SEC and the FBI: http://www.propublica.org/article/sec-bomb-detector-bought-by-military-was-front-for-scam-717 http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2008/comp20645_sniffex.pdf http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2008/lr20645.htm Unfortunately, the scam continued with the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of the worthless equipment in the rest of the world, especially Iraq and Thailand and resulted in several deaths documented on Youtube in Thailand and unknown numbers of deaths in Iraq. Prosecution of the perpetrators of those schemes is still uncertain. The whole dreadful situation of people who make millions by selling dowsing rods as explosive detectors in mostly undeveloped countries is continuously documented here: http://sniffexquestions.blogspot.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 A device similar to Sniffex sold in Iraq: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBQEkXkSVd0 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWr6NO8YAbk There was a video on Youtube which showed a member of the military "clearing" a motor bike with a dowsing rod, soldiers moving in, and the bike exploding from a hidden explosive device which the detector failed to find. Six people died right on film. I couldn't find it so maybe it was redacted from Youtube for the violence. The still photos of this incident are here (WARNING: very graphic and violent and may be NSFW): http://sniffexquestions.blogspot.com/2009/10/what-does.html To summarize, sometimes in some countries, pump and dump schemers do get their hands slapped and their gains reversed. In most places, even in egregious cases that result in injuries and deaths, the scammers are not punished. I think the appropriate punishment for the Sniffex scammers would have been to place them inside an intense mine field and give them one of their own "explosive detectors" to get themselves out. Sorry for the OT aspects of this post but the point is that scams can be lethal as well as financially destructive and even then it can take an extremely long time to stop them and the punishment to the perpetrators is not sufficient.
