Readers of the Fraud Files are familiar with the story of Jennifer McKinney – - mommy blogger who calls herself MckMama – - who is prone to lies and exaggerations. She and her husband Israel were accused of  lying to and manipulating readers for financial gain. What began as a touching story of a family with a very sick child turned into a long-running gravy train, from which Jennifer and Israel McKinney profited handsomely.

But making hundreds of thousands of dollars from gullible sheeple reading a blog wasn’t enough for the McKinneys. No, they had to run up over $725,000 of debts and attempt to have them discharged in bankruptcy. Fortunately, bankruptcy trustee Gene Doeling caught on quickly, and accused them of attempting to defraud their creditors by failing to report tens of thousands of dollars of income per year.

UPDATE: In March 2011, CFO Jacky Lam of China Media Express and the auditors (Deloitte) resigned. Deloitte said they could no longer rely on the representations of management, and they suggested an investigation was in order. Ping Luo, the analyst from Global Hunter who gave CCME rave reviews resigned. Maurice Greenberg’s Starr Investments sued CCME for fraudulently inducing it to invest $13.5 million. The stock was delisted from the NASDAQ in May 2011.

Deloitte raised the following issues: questionable authenticity of bank statements, supicioius bank confirmation procedures, existence of advertisers/customers, undisclosed bank accounts and bank loans, financial filings with the State Administration of Industry and Commerce differing from information provided to auditors, questionable authenticity of tax filing documents, cash payments to employees, and double counting of buses.

As I have found out all too well in the last two years, those who are critical of public companies risk retaliation. Retailing failure Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) has spent years perfecting their methods of stalking and intimidating anyone who dares to criticize their perpetual losses, their wackadoo CEO Patrick Byrne, the gross incompetence of management, and (most importantly) their fraudulent financial reporting.

I have a particular interest in multi-level marketing (MLM), and in publicly voicing my dislike of this bogus “business model,” have been subjected to retaliation from the companies themselves as well as individuals associated with the companies. The most vicious attack is by Medifast and its MLM division, Take Shape For Life (TSFL). I first became aware of Medifast via a small project for a client, but became interested in the company and how it was achieving extraordinarily good financial results.

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.

UPDATE: Overstock.com just issued a press release in which Patrick Byrne calls Grant Thornton a bunch of liars. Add them to his list of “miscreants.”

No longer can Patrick Byrne, wacky CEO of Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) claim that those pointing out his lies and materially misleading financial statements are just “miscreants,” operatives of an imaginary “Sith Lord,” or [insert any of a number of Jewish slurs that Byrne is prone to use].  Now national auditing firm Grant Thornton is calling Patrick Byrne and his clowns liars. He’s collecting quite a slew of admirers.

Yesterday, Overstock filed an 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding their firing of Grant Thornton. Here’s what Overstock.com has to say about the accounting issue that led to the firing, and I have placed in bold the most important part:

This week Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) notified the public that they wouldn’t file their third quarter 10-Q on time. The reason:

The registrant has been unable to complete its financial statements for the quarter ended September 30, 2009, as it is continuing to analyze the proper accounting treatment for $785,000 the registrant received during the first quarter of 2009 as repayment  under a new agreement with the vendor for amounts the registrant overpaid to the vendor in 2008 and early 2009.  The registrant believes the amount is properly recognizable in the first quarter of 2009, when the cash was received.  However, the registrant is continuing to review the issue, and may ultimately conclude that the amount should have been recognized in 2008.

White collar crime fighter and reformed felon Sam Antar has done it again. He has exposed the most recent financial statement fraud being perpetrated by Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) and wacky CEO Patrick Byrne.

Of course, this doesn’t come as any surprise to anyone who has been following the company. Overstock cannot turn a profit, and when management claims they have turned a profit (or managed to record a lower loss than usual), the one thing you can be sure of is that they’ve violated a bunch of accounting rules and are committing blatant acts of financial statement fraud.

For almost two years, Sam Antar (convicted felon and former CFO of Crazy Eddie) has been writing about Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) and his questions about their financial reporting and disclosures. I became interested in the company’s financial statements and SEC filings a few months later and began blogging about Overstock and nutty CEO Patrick Byrne as well.

One constant since then has been the criticism of fans of Patrick Byrne and Overstock. Byrne has been trying to silence his critics, and even went so far as to hire cyberstalker Judd Bagley to threaten and intimidate the company’s critics.

On Monday, a press release announced that the long legal battle between Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK), its nutty CEO Patrick Byrne, and Gradient Analytics was over.

It was somewhat disappointing, when it seemed that the heart of the lawsuit was an attempt to silence critics. Scare research firms so much that they’ll be reluctant to publish negative opinions about public companies. Public companies win.

Thanks to Sam Antar for these interesting searches,  the results of which are no doubt generated based upon special intervention from the Sith Lord.

I’ve been contemplating this topic for a couple of weeks, but just didn’t have the stomach to write about it. Fortunately, Gary Weiss has mentioned it and given me the courage to suck it up and write about it.

What’s the topic? The ever-nauseating Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK). Since at least 2005, he has been ranting about Sith Lords and conspiracy theories. The whole thrust of his argument was that there was a vast conspiracy to tank the price of Overstock’s stock via Naked Short Selling (NSS). It never mattered to Patrick Byrne that he couldn’t prove that NSS was having a measurable effect on Overstock’s stock price. He said it was so, and that made it so for him and his followers.