Two weeks ago, a Kos diarist by the name of Tom Sykes took issue with a post I made about the hedge fund industry. He then proceeded to trash me, by name, in a post he wrote slamming Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who runs an investigative blog called Deep Capture.
Over the past few years, Deep Capture has published numerous reports on the the improprieties that some hedge funds have engaged in, such as naked short selling and blatant stock manipulation. Deep Capture has also exposed a number of journalists who shill for a network of hedge funds, pumping reports that these hedge funds are trading on and trashing their critics.
One such journalist is Gary Weiss, who maintains his own blog but regularly uses false names on message boards to bash stocks targeted by hedge funds and to savage Patrick Byrne. Weiss also has a habit of editing Wikipedia entries, including his own.
Tom Sykes is relatively new to Kos. He has written seven diaries, four of which are about Patrick Byrne. Thus, it would appear he has an agenda, no?
That Sykes has an agenda has now been confirmed by Deep Capture writer Judd Bagley. This is because Tom Sykes is Gary Weiss. Finkle is Einhorn.
The way that this fact was ascertained - by planting spyware in a Yahoo message board - is unethical. But is it not entirely unethical to post under the name Tom Sykes and then cite your own work, pretending it's an independent source, to prove your claims?
Weiss's latest blog describes how Byrne hired the wingnut publicists at Advocacy Ink to push his crap.
Of course it is. Even better, in the same Kos post, Sykes awkwardly defends Gary Weiss:
Byrne is a liar who makes stuff up. Here is a quote from the Deep Capture blog in which he tries to connect me with one of his enemies, Gary Weiss. The post is actually written by Bagley, but he is acting for Byrne so I view this as "Byrne talking":
Now, exactly who’s paying him is unknown, though it must be someone because the fellow has otherwise been unemployed since 2004 (apart from his less-than-lethargic book sales, the pittance in ad revenue generated by his all-but-mothballed blog, and his one ostensibly paid piece for Portfolio Magazine – a publication whose final coffin nail Weiss personally helped to drive).
That's a lie. Weiss's blog (see right panel) lists eight articles for Portfolio Magazine, not "one ostensibly paid piece." Who's lying, him or Weiss? Click on the links there and see if they take you to actual articles or to blank spots on the web. Let that be your test as to who's the liar.
Wow, just reading that was uncomfortable. How's this for unethical? Weiss wrote on his blog:
A blogger at the Daily Kos, who had been needling Byrne in previous posts, reports tonight that he was sent a spyware-infected email that obviously came from Byrne's henchman, the ever-nauseating Judd Bagley. Bagley also sent links to crude tracking spyware planted in Yahoo message boards.
The typically nauseating details are here.
And these posts were written by Weiss and Sykes after it was unequivocally proven that they were sharing the same IP address. As a side note, Gary Weiss, who has been banned from editing Wikipedia pages due to past abuse, has twice cleaned up Michael Milken's Wikipedia entry, removing sections detailing Deep Capture's investigative reports on him.
On DailyKos, Sykes has posted under the guise that he's a liberal who hates hedge funds but despises Patrick Byrne because he's a Ron Paul supporter and a libertarian:
At the same time that Byrne has been fighting hard against the EFCA and serving on the board of the far-right Milton Friedman foundation and supporting Ron Paul for president, he has amazingly been winning fans among some bloggers on the left, including Kos diarist Andrew Perez (andrewtna), because of his posturing on Wall Street.
You'll notice he threw my name in there, too.
Weiss also generally cites financial journalists who say Byrne is a hack to discredit him. These same journalists used to say that naked short selling does not exist. Now, critics of naked shorting exaggerate its effects on the market. These same journalists have been caught (via spyware, again) emailing on friendly terms with the hedge funds Deep Capture has accused of stock manipulation. Seriously.
And as for the fact that Byrne is a bigtime fundraiser for Ron Paul - which has led many Kos posters duped by Sykes to trash him - why should it matter what his political affiliation is?
Deep Capture's claims that hedge funds have engaged in naked short selling to crush stocks have been vindicated by the fact that naked short selling has been blamed for the demise of Lehman Brothers.
Furthermore, the SEC announced yesterday it had made permanent an emergency rule to prevent naked shorting. Although this rule is not strong enough, this is at least an acknowledgement on the part of the SEC that naked short selling is a genuine problem.
The reason I wrote this post is not to prop up Patrick Byrne or Deep Capture, though I would recommend that all here read their work. I wrote this post to make sure that no more Kos readers fall for the FRAUD that is Tom Sykes. He fooled enough people yesterday.
It appears that some users have notified administrators to ban users who have outed Sykes and I hope this doesn't happen to me. If it does, so be it. Tom Sykes is a con artist and Kos users have a right to know that they should treat anything he writes as completely devoid of truth.
UPDATE: I've edited the title so as not to be calling out a Kos diarist so blatantly.