SEC files securities fraud charges against Google Board of Directors member

Not that it matters in our current rigged markets, but shortly after this news broke today, Google's stock shot up 20 dollars a share. A week ago Google announced they actually lost money compared to a year ago if not for currency translation, and the stock shot up 100 dollars. I can only imagine how high the stock will go if Larry or Sergey get pulled over for drunk driving in their Tesla roadsters with a dead hooker in the passenger seat. 200 dollars more per share? 300?

Anyway, here's today's news. It turns out that a member of Google's current Board of Directors used to work as the chief financial officer at Pixar, and she's finally getting busted for the outrageous stock-option backdating fraud that she orchestrated during her tenure there. Google sure knows how to hire the right executives for the job! Criminal experience and fraud, that's all we need to hear- you're hired!

Read the full news story here.

The funny part is that Eric Schmidt was doing an entire day-long interview on CNBC today, and not once was this mentioned. All Maria Bartiromo could do was toss softball questions at him and try to contain her orgasms whenever he spoke.

Comments

[just me]

Just for clarification, any charges by the SEC are "civil" charges (meaning the only punishment will be fines). I do not believe I have read that any criminal charges (that could result in jail time) will be filed.

Not to imply that civil charges are somehow less serious -- investors should not be ignoring this sort of thing.

[just me]

Also, I tried to post the other day with a number of links to discussions by Google advertisers about the junk traffic they are receiving from parked-domain sites. There is recent court action on a suit regarding this topic.

TypePad flagged my post as possible spam (I assume because of the links) and said it would need administrator attention before it could be posted. If you don't have it to review, I can post the links again.

[armycitizen]

Ann Mather isn't the problem here. Therese Polette has written the first insightful article about this case.

Here's an excerpt from it: "But as yet another executive who was once close to Jobs comes under the backdating cloud, one has to wonder: Is Jobs as innocent as Apple Inc. and its board have repeatedly claimed? Or is the government afraid to go after one of the most respected leaders of American business?"

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/steve-jobs-inner-circle-far/story.aspx?guid=%7B02C92FED%2D8184%2D432C%2D841F%2DA481D96E534C%7D&siteid=yhoof

[perpmcsnooble]

FUCKEDPIXAR?

Dude, you say "do this". I do the complete opposite. I make money. Keep it up. Love your work.

[Marah Marie]

"All Maria Bartiromo could do was toss softball questions at him and try to contain her orgasms whenever he spoke."

She's that way with pretty much everyone. Then Katie Couric gets canned for being too cheerful. It's pretty much the same difference - both fluff out serious news - the only difference is slant, and I guess Maria has plenty of that.

I wish the Archives were back. There's gaps on archive.org when they didn't index that I can't fill in. I say that because the name of another guy who came from a fraudulent background to Google is tickling my mind now - not the guy from the post you did last week but another one from maybe a year ago, and there's more fraudsters than that going deeper into the past, I think - but I can't recall their names, and it's bothering me. Even if archive.org had a perfect record of FG (far from it) it would be easier to grab it from here.

Aaaaaand Google's getting sued - again - I was surprised to see Silicon Alley just barely touched on it -

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/google_sued_for_ad_program_fraud_

I could read about Google getting sued forever while I politely restrain the urge to just sue them myself. I've got so many things I could sue for I'm not sure where I'd begin (copyright infringement? opt out, not opt in? - those issues are tip of the iceburg - the fact that if you don't own the site your content is on you're not allowed to change any information about it in the Index is another big issue, and I'm sure I could come up with more related to PageRank and other problems with Google's way of handling things...). I keep hanging on waiting for the day when someone does it -

[hack]

Are you thinking of David Drummond?

[hack]

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2005/tc20050114_0781_tc119.htm

[Eric Schmidt]

A friendly note to anyone who is applying for a job at Google and is about to commit some petty crime to pad their resume with: first of all, a criminal background is only required for executive level positions. Second, any criminal activities must be directly related to securities fraud in order to count in your favor. That is all, thank you.

[perpmcsnooble]

Oh Marah...you sound like Dorothy..."Oh I wish I could sue Google, Toto...".

Do you know how pathetic that reads? Good luck with that law-suit: suing a firm for advertising your products and services on throd-party web-sites, even though you don't know about it...well, what a blow..."derail's clients advertising strategies..."you have to be kidding me.

Thank God for the US legal system, eh?

[just me]

perpmcsnooble,

You really need to learn about the methods Google uses to "screw over" its own customers.

I'd suggest you start reading what this Google advertising is saying here:

http://www.apogee-web-consulting.com/blogger/2007/11/how-google-uses-fake-searches-click.html

Google is partnered with outright scammers and engaged in deception telling advertisers their ads are being displayed on the "search network" when Google is actually displaying the ads on third-party landing pages.

[Marah Marie]

hack, thanks - it was David Drummond, indeed. One other guy, too, must be going back to '04 or so? He may be in the archive.org records - haven't dragged myself over to them yet, but I will. It's maddening to have their names just on the tip of my tongue but not recall them.

perp, it is not that "I wish I could sue Google". Where did I mention "wishing"? I said I was "politely restraining myself" - which indeed I am. Anyone can sue Google. I could sue them tomorrow (or Mon., since tomorrow the courts are closed) if I wanted to - and I do.

But suing Google would take time and money - two things I'm a bit short on. I would also prefer a class action suit to get as many people with me as possible. Not to mention I might look silly suing them all by myself. But I've been after their asses for years and nothing changes - not even my desire to sue them right into obscurity.

[.]

wasnt drummond in trouble for accounting fraud at his previous company? is he even still with google?

[Elmo]

Sure, like just about everyone, don't much care for the products/family/company that is Microsoft (and one could scribble reams of bad existential poetry about). But Googe? Well that be another matter entirely. A world/realm beyond. Was thinking yesterday about the YaSoft/MicroHoo shotgun wedding (shoy'urr ... dangerous for the likes of moi). And how skewed the thinking be, regards anti-trust. Googe's reach extends far, far beyond its own branded search platform. Its engine (and algorithm) being the motive force for countless other search engines/sites/platforms. The severity of its grip, masked by different nameplates/appliques over the other boxes of search.
.
Blah, blah, blah

[Bubble]

Our company is suing Google for several practises, spamdexing is the first one( at the end of the month ) where all the parties have already exchanged their conclusions. Google's conclusions were very poor and undevelopped, 2/3 of it was focused on their irresponsability as hosting company ( >

There is a second actions which will actually be treated faster about the identification as advertising of some adsense content. The law is very clear about this problem. I heard some websites had click throughs of 6% which is amazing. ( I didn't only heard that, I realized it by myself but this document will remain confidential )
If you see how vivastreet.fr is showing their adsense with xml output given from google ( see how they cooperate to deliver faster and eat the advertising budget of the advertisers )

A third one is on the road, but it is too early to speak about it.

[Bubble]

this text miss after "hosting company":

editor ) and the irrecevability of our complaint by the court. The third part is full of non-sense and contradictions like " we do not have problems with duplicate contents" ok but why do you have a brevet about it ? why do you say it is not tolerate in your conditions ? why did u blacklist us for this reason 2 years ago ?

[.]

NO DEAL!

Microsoft just announced they have retracted their offer to buy Yahoo.

LOL!!!

[Marah Marie]

@ Bubble -That reminds me -

I'll leave the name of the website out but this could blow admin's and a few other's minds since this guy is relatively well-known online - let's see how many of you can guess who it is - if you do guess maybe I'll let you know.

This guy wrote a post on *one* of his personal websites recently about his failed interview at Google. It got Dugg. One day after the Digg, I went back to his site and saw it had been stripped of it's CSS.

When you checked page source it was nothing but spam for Viagra, pharma and mortgage crap - hundreds if not thousands of links dynamically generated through a script *and nothing else* - no heading, no meta, no outbound links to the CSS or references to them in the site's own directories - nothing.

I left this guy a comment or two about it because the day before it had nice CSS and I'd been planning on taking the CSS file and reworking it into something for one of my own websites. He screened my comments - never published them or replied.

It's normal to take your CSS down during a big Digg but its *not* normal to strip the page of it's proper heading for w3c.org, to strip the meta, and to dynamically generate nothing but direct links (URLs) to hundreds (or thousands) of spam websites and conceal them on *every page* of your website, links to some of the most despicable crap out there imaginable.

So I wrote to Google. Three emails. Google's response?

Nothing.

The only address I could trace the ads back to?

Google.

Then people ask me "why do you hate Google?" It would take me hours to get through my answer.

[Bubble]

Mariah, maybe his website was hacked during one day ?

I have website where people write in FFFFFC code on a FFFFFF background, and the keyword appearing 40 times. The decision will fall very soon. Since the start of this procedure, Google made a clean up and remove all the problematic pages. Google did not change anything before the procedure was started.

In another case, being treated in emergency, a website had 720.000 pages indexed ( still 320.000 ) but only 60.000 different pages, maybe 70.000 if you take in consideration the categories.
The fact is that he generate artificial page with combinations of cities and categories.

[Marah Marie]

It went on for three days after which I stopped looking becaue I could not stand being ignored by everyone anymore.

When I said the only address I could trace the ads back to was Google, I meant that was the company generating the ads. So they were just are as guilty as he is.

I checked the website in question last night after writing about it here - first time I've looked at it since days after his Google-reject story went big.

He got his AdSense account canceled. I don't know whether to feel happy that I probably had something to do with that, or to feel pissed at the hypocrisy of Google canceling their own pharma, mortgage and Viagra ads because I kicked up a fuss. Do you know how many hundreds of thousands of spam/domain holder/doorway/asshole-like-the-guy-above sites Google still so generously provides such ads on? Anyone think I should go after all of them?

How about going after Google for providing those ads in the first place? Yeah, right...

[dedhed]

Unlike you, burpmaspoogle, marah and justme actually have a point.

[Marah Marie]

@ dedhed - burpmaspoogle? - now that's funny. I've called him a few variations on his "name" myself - "perp", "poopisnoble", etc. - but that reworking of it has much more flair :).

@ Bubble - please email me (just um, "google" my name - the first blog that comes up is mine) - I have a story related to the one you told above - I got a spam site with 800,000 pages and growing taken out of Google (and their AdSense account suspended) after they hijacked my webpage from the Index - and LiveJournal's Community page, and a lot of pages on Yahoo.com - any chance you guys are going class action with what you're doing?

[perpmcsnooble]

Soo...no more idle chatter about suing Google...why so? Is it because what last week looked like a good bet is suddenly no longer a good bet? Suddenly the 800 pound gorilla in the room managed to gain 100 pounds from the 300 pound gorilla that sits next to him?

I can see the way the litigation will go

"We're suing you because you advertised our products / services on third party websites without our authorisation"

'Did you read your T&C?"

"Err...maybe"

How much money did you make last year"

"Errr...not much"

"How are you going to make money this financial year?"

"We're suing you, aren't we? It's the American way: we're losers, so we find away to sue the winners?"

Good luck.

Like I said, like those tiny birds that feed off shit that accumulates on a hippo's back.

Laughable.