UPDATE: Gary Weiss has an excellent followup on this situation HERE
Remember to tune in HERE to LiveStock today 1-2PM EST & learn how real stock market people, not conspiracy theorists, profit from discovering stock market manipulation.
I’ve written about the circus clown/top stock industry-bitch CEO of struggling Overstock.com Inc. (OSTK) Patrick Byrne and his crazy short selling conspiracy theories HERE, HERE and HERE before, but now he looks to be caught red handed for cyber-stalking his critics…now why would anybody want to short sell this guy’s company? LOL
Gary Weiss blew the case wide open with this ridiculously long and detailed blog post and Alley Insider sums it up nicely:
Earlier this week, several bloggers and journalists, like Barry Ritholtz, Gary Weiss, and Felix Salmon, discovered that Overstock.com (OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne had created a list of all their Facebook friends.
Henry Blodget, John Carney, and I were all on the list, along with several others.
So how did he get all the names? No, it wasn’t hacking.
Just good old social engineering.
Gary Weiss discovered that a Facebook user named “Larry Bergman” had gone around and friended everyone on the list.
One of the people who tried to “friend” me on Facebook was the person with the above picture, who gave his name as “Larry Bergman.”
But that’s not his name, and that’s not his picture. (See update. That’s a copyrighted, stolen photo.) His name is Judd Bagley, and he is Byrne’s pretexting specialist.
Bagley created “Bergman” and an unknown number of phony Facebook accounts to con people into “friending” him. That way he could circumvent Facebook security, violating their rules and, well, Lord knows how many laws he broke in this pretexting scheme.
The aim was to get their friends’ lists in order to publish them on Byrne’s “Deep Capture” website. That, in turn, is then used to concoct elaborate conspiracy theories.
Bergman even started friending people’s friends and family and kids.
You should read Weiss’s whole post because it provides pretty compelling evidence that Bergman is Bagley, including the steps he’s staken to cover his tracks.
Anyway, after this post, we’ll be unfriending him.
Byrne you deserve to be locked away…seriously dude, you represent everything that is evil on Wall Street and your stock is so boring, it’s not even worth shorting!
Tags: Patrick Byrne, Patrick Byrne Overstock, Patrick Byrne Short Selling, Patrick Byrne Should Be Locked Away
