Welcome!

Security Authors: Walter Hinton, Maureen O'Gara, Kevin Nikkhoo, Lev Lesokhin, Peter Silva

Related Topics: SOA & WOA, .NET, Search, AJAX & REA, Web 2.0, Security

SOA & WOA: Article

Report of $400 Million Google Acquisition a Fake

On its web site PRWeb.com attributed the “fraudulent” press release to “identity theft”

By Maureen O'Gara
Article Rating:
November 27, 2012 08:47 AM EST
Reads:
 2,132

A short ungrammatical misspelled press release put out on PRWeb Monday morning and jumped on by the AP and TechCrunch because it claimed that Google had paid $400 million for Rhode Island-based public hotspot provider ICOA proved to be a hoax.

The company's pink sheets stock sells for under a penny, almost nothing in fact, and only moved from $0.0001 to $0.0005 on the fake news. Around 500 million shares traded, including a swat of 330 million shares, worth around $225,000, sold by somebody.

ICOA's daily volume is usually around 2.6 million shares.

ICOA said it's notified the SEC. It thinks the bogus press release and probable pump-and-sump scheme originated from Aruba.

On its web site PRWeb.com attributed the "fraudulent" press release to "identity theft" that happens "on occasion, across all of the major wire services." It also said the matter has been turned over to the proper authorities for further investigation.

Published November 27, 2012 – Reads 2,132
Copyright © 2012 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.