Eureka! Defrauded Investors Are Getting (Gasp) All Their Money Back

I'm surprised that so little attention has been paid to some truly extraordinary news that came out of the SEC this week: investors in two related stock scams,  the Concorde America and Absolute Health microcap cons, are getting all of their money back. I repeat: all of their money back.

Here it is, in black and white, on the SEC website.

Compare this to investors in the Bernie Madoff scam, who can confidently expect to get a big wad of wet toilet paper for every dollar they invested with the Shtunk.

There are a lot of investors in these two con games, 1,355 according to the SEC, and they will get... well, this is where it gets less than impressive.... a grand total of $3,5 million. That's a bit over $2000 per person.

Oh well. At least they are being made whole.

Not named in the SEC's press release are the two dogged amateur sleuths who fought this stock promotion, Floyd Schneider and Richard M. Cocchieri. I profiled these two gents, and other activist investors, in a Business Week article in 2002.

Rich has moved down to Florida and has kept a low profile in recent years, while Floyd is continuing to fight investment fraud. That has, inevitably I guess, put him on the enemies list of (who else?) Overstock.com's wack-a-doo CEO Patrick Byrne, and his nauseating stalker Judd Bagley.

Here's a further irony: as Roddy Boyd reported in the New York Post in 2007, Floyd's contact at the SEC at the time was a certain Brent Baker, who later swung through the revolving door and became a legal counsel to Overstock.com. (Byrne, in a typical flight of hypocritical chutzpah, lamented the SEC-corporate revolving door in a recent blog post.)

Floyd tells me that Baker "received all the info and let their scam keep running for months," and that he and Rich brought their case to another SEC office, and law enforcement authorities, to halt the scam.

Small world, ain't it?