ICOA Wasn't Acquired by Google, Executive Says | Hacker News Reader

ICOA Wasn't Acquired by Google, Executive Says

blogs.wsj.com

46 pointsobeone8 comments

I assume this was the reason? http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=ICOA+Basic+Chart&t=5d

I don't see how they'd even make their money back on the $500 press release at those prices, but whatever.

Like the oft-parodied old ads would say: volume, volume, volume!

Correctomundo: 200M shares * 400 microdollars = $80K, and there were several periods at 200M.

Someone needs to kill OTC/pink sheets. The NYSE/Nasdaq is close-enough to a scam, god knows that the non-listed guys aren't helping.

They must've been a target stock in a pump-n-dump scam.

I get it that TechCrunch etc all need to push news at breakneck speed, but not even bothering to fact-check a PRWeb.com story is kind of ridiculous.

PRWeb is a penny-stock / SEO favorite because essentially you can pay PRWeb $499 and your story goes onto Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, WSJ, etc in their "Press Releases" sections (which in some cases appear directly next to the stock information).

Brands like the SF Chronicle have entire sections dedicated to PRWeb where anybody can borrow the SFGate credibility / wrapper and publish just about anything they like, like say a slip & fall attorney:

http://www.sfgate.com/business/prweb/article/Boston-Slip-and...

So yah, we all know that editorial standards are slipping but that was just a face plant by reporting agencies.

It shouldn't even be that expensive. You can designate a single region for way less than that (or at least you could, it's been years since I looked into it) and to trick it into the business press, you need to only add links like Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) to your pr story.

In the late 90s, companies would add ridiculous statements like "company X manages large scale industrial controls in the same vein as GE (NYSE:GE) , HP (NYSE:HPQ) and IBM (NYSE:IBM)" to scam yahoo and other pubs into linking their PR From the popular stock pages. It was very lame.

Especially because even without actually contacting Google, this story should raise some eyebrows on the plausibility sanity check. The company, previous to the announcement, had a market cap measured in the 6 figures, fluctuating between $300k and $800k depending on when you look. And Google bought it for $400 million? There would have to be some pretty surprising nonpublic information about the company to pay that kind of multiple.

People are calling this a pump and dump scheme.

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