This week I’ve been writing about the cyberstalking activities of Judd Bagley on behalf of the Deep Capture website funded by Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com. In a nutshell, Byrne and company published a list of their enemies, which essentially includes journalists, bloggers, and hedge fund managers who think Overstock.com is a massive failure and aren’t afraid to talk about it.

The enemies list published this week included all the Facebook friends of these enemies, in an apparent attempt to demonstrate the conspiracy to manipulate the stock market these alleged conspirators are involved in.

The story about the Oversock.com theory that anyone who is “friends” on Facebook is part of a naked short selling conspiracy keeps getting weirder. It was bad enough that former Overstock.com employee and paid stalker (paid by OSTK CEO Patrick Byrne, nonetheless) Judd Bagley has created a database of Facebook users and their friend lists.

Bagley has gone further than anyone realized, but we should have expected this. This isn’t Bagley’s first crack at cyberstalking. He’s got a colorful history of doing so. And Patrick Byrne and Overstock are becoming rather famous for issuer retaliation… going after critics of public companies in order to hopefully scare them into silence. These activities go back to at least 2006.

Journalist Gary Weiss writes:

In the world of Patrick Byrne, CEO of flailing Overstock.com (NYSE:OSTK), his paid stalkers, and his nutty followers, anything and everything is evidence of a massive conspiracy on Wall Street. Involved in this massive conspiracy are “captured” journalists who “take orders” from hedge funds and help manipulate the stockmarket.

Remember the days when Byrne was claiming that his company’s poor stock price was a direct result of naked short selling of the company stock? And when that allegation couldn’t be proven and consistent poor financial results (even poor after the accounting department did a little magic on them each quarter) seemed to be the real reason the company’s stock hasn’t done well…. then the real story became the massive conspiracy on Wall Street.

I could literally spend all day blogging about scams on consumers. And the consumers don’t even have to be gullible. There are plenty of scams that look completely legitimate from the outside, and it’s not until you’re involved with them that you realize they’re scams.

The latest scheme or scam that is being exposed is Immediate Edge. A fellow blogger wrote about Immediate Edge, but didn’t fully commit to calling it a scam just yet.

There’s a fine line between the First Amendment right to free speech and defamation, and this has become an increasingly larger problem online. What do you do if you’ve been careful with your reputation personally and professionally, but someone with a vendetta decides to attack you?

Internet lawyer John Dozier is one of the country’s leading experts on the issue of online defamation, and is the author of Google Bomb: The Untold Story of the $11.3M Verdict That Changed the Way We Use the Internet. The book details the Sue Scheff’s landmark internet defamation case that reminded the world that real people are the target of online harassment, cyberbulling, privacy invasion, and Google bombs. A “Google bomb” is an attempt to manipulate the Google rankings related to a particular search term to the detriment of a person or organization.