Dot-Con Job: How InfoSpace took its investors for a ride

Date:March 14, 2005 / year-entry #64
Tags:non-computer
Orig Link:https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050314-00/?p=36193
Comments:    8
Summary:


Comments (8)
  1. mookie says:

    I know a couple who lost a bundle to AMT tax pre-exercising options when they were working at InfoSpace. They were ripping off their employees too.

  2. Mr. Ed says:

    I guess "1993" should be "1999".

    -=-=-

    It’s pretty funny how the shortest quote is from the best quarter.

  3. Norman Diamond says:

    Some of the Seattle Times articles that you linked to are interesting too. A judge (overruled after 2 years) and a US government agency (not overruled) acted in assistance of the fraud. This is the kind of thing one expects to see in Japan and China.

  4. Johann Gerell says:

    :-)

    Hilarious! These guys really had no connection whatsoever to reality.

  5. I was actually quite proud of how Rick Thompson came out in that article.

    Rick was my corp VP for about 2 years (before we were re-orged around) and I was always impressed with him.

  6. anonymous says:

    "This is the kind of thing one expects to see in Japan and China."

    I suppose you mean to imply "and not the U.S."? I think there’s plenty of it here, but most people don’t care that much about it.

    The current US President engaged in insider trading as an executive of Harken Energy, and up until the most recent election cycle, his largest lifetime corporate campaign contributor was Enron. And of course he’s in his second term now.

    Given the extent to which politicians have a vested interest in serving the corporate interests that fund so much of their campaigns, the only thing that’s really surprising is that this sort of thing isn’t even more rampant.

  7. Norman Diamond says:

    > "This is the kind of thing one expects to

    >> see in Japan and China."

    >

    > I suppose you mean to imply "and not the

    > U.S."?

    Sometimes there are newspaper articles about US government agencies enforcing laws especially when related to securities. For some reason I interpreted that as meaning that the US tends to enforce its securities laws. I should have remembered that it means something different.

    Here is why news does mean something different:

    Sometimes there are newspaper articles about Japanese government agencies enforcing laws. In these cases I know exactly what it means. Ordinary common events, like "dog bites man" or "Japanese government agency ignores laws and assists criminals" aren’t news. Highly unusual events, like "man bites dog" or "Japanese government agency obeys law", that’s news.

Comments are closed.


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