o.co – Fraud Files Forensic Accounting Blog

26 Apr

Evidence of Naked Short Selling? Hardly.

The tinfoil hat-wearing crew over at Deep Capture thinks they’ve finally demonstrated an actual case of Naked Short Selling damaging a company. (They’ve been asked repeatedly to prove that naked short selling has ever severely damaged a company, and have yet to produce proof that any such thing has happened.)

What they’ve instead demonstrated is what an utter moron Patrick Byrne, the incompetent CEO of Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) is. Maybe this most recent article written by Byrne is definitive proof of why Overstock.com cannot turn a profit and has to resort to fraudulent financial frolicking to make it seem like they’re doing something right. Read More →

28 Jun

Short Selling, Miscreants Ball, and Conspiracies… OH MY!

On August 12, 2005, Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) had a conference call he said was going to give information about the “August 11 lawsuit.”

The transcript is 17 glorious pages of Byrne rambling about his conspiracy theories. No questions. Just Byrne and conspiracy theories. I read it on Thursday. And I didn’t really know what to do with it. Do I try to summarize all the nonsense? Then what?

Fortunately, a poster on a stock message board has saved me the trouble. Here’s what he calls the Reader’s Digest version of the transcript. If you’re normal, you will get less than 1/4 through it and swear that this person is lying. The transcript of this public conference call sponsored by Overstock.com couldn’t possibly have happened this way. Oh yes, it could. Read the transcript for yourself! Read More →

20 Jun

A Little “Deep Capture” Cover-Up in the Works?

Gary Weiss has a most excellent post on his blog about an apparent cover-up in progress by Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK).

Here’s the deal: For a couple of years now, Patrick has been ranting and raving about conspiracies and Sith Lords and secret fax machines and other oddities related to Naked Short Selling. (Just type “sith lord” into the search box to the right to get a flavor of what I mean.) He is going to be the savior of the investing world, and DeepCapture.com is his “journalistic” endeavor related to this. Read More →

06 Jun

Securities & Exchange Commission Closes Inquiry Into Overstock.com

Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) announced today that the Salt Lake City office of the SEC notified them that it is not recommending any enforcement action against the company.

The following was reported:

“I know that the SEC has an obligation to look into allegations it receives about any company — even when those allegations are false,” said Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com’s chairman and chief executive officer. “I believe that this inquiry was initiated, and persisted, because of false allegations made by a cohesive group of short sellers and a few financial journalists who dutifully serve them. In this case, I believe these folks fomented the SEC investigation against Overstock.com then tried to claim that the existence of an SEC investigation was evidence of wrong doing. We knew that was false.”

GAAP Being Replaced By BOSS

It’s official. The Sith Lord and I have concluded our meeting, and public companies in the United States will no longer be required to follow GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). Instead, they will immediately begin following BOSS (Because Overstock Said So).

Many of you are not surprised by this change. With Patrick Byrne’s impressive ability to manipulate the accounting rules for the benefit of his company, Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK), it only makes sense that we reward him by allowing him to make the accounting rules going forward. (He makes his own rules anyway, so what’s the difference?) Read More →

22 Apr

Latest Overstock.com Lie: 2007 First Quarter Numbers Were GAAP

Yesterday Sam Antar printed a very interesting piece on his blog that sharply criticized the 2008 first quarter earnings release of Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK). I picked up the most damaging part of it, which related to Overstock claiming a 27% increase in revenue over 2007. The problem was that 2008 was calculated in a different way than 2007, so the numbers are not comparable. First quarter 2008 numbers got a “bump” that made the quarter’s increase over the prior year look bigger than it should.

But leave it to Overstock to make matters worse. An article today on Wired.com says the following: Read More →

11 Feb

Overstock.com: The “turnaround” that wasn’t

2006 was a bad year for Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK). (As if any year isn’t bad for them?) Jason Lindsey even said that the 2006 numbers were “bad on purpose”:

“All of the things we have talked about before as far as classifying all of our SKUs as either red and green and 80% of our — excuse me, 20% of our inventory was doing 80% of our gross profits, or even more than that. We took all that to heart in the fourth quarter and although the fourth quarter results are very bad, and I admit they are very bad, they were bad on purpose. In other words, we used the fourth quarter to get rid of all the slow-moving inventory. I am quite pleased with the inventory balances we have now.”

Patrick Byrne spent much of 2007 bragging about the “turnaround” that the company was having: Read More →