

ICOA Wasn't Acquired by Google, Executive Says - obeone
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/11/26/icoa-wasnt-acquired-by-google-executive-says/

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

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

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jpdoctor
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.

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

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aresant
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...](http://www.sfgate.com/business/prweb/article/Boston-Slip-and-Fall-
Lawyers-Risk-Compensation-4066129.php)

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

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cdibona
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.

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w1ntermute
People are calling this a pump and dump scheme.

