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Video - Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Update On AmeriTV's Suspicious $45M Round

UPDATE: Is there anything worse than International Internet scam artists? Yes, amateur International Internet scam artists.
+ Silicon Alley Insider connects some dots to "nearly early identical fund-raising announcements for pretend companies HRF Chemicals and MHNZ Biosciences via phony press releases on Nov. 2."
+ The company that distributed the releases, PR Leap, has taken down the releases.
+ Silicon Alley Insider currently casts First Mutual Credit as a potential victim, however, we have still not yet heard back from people there and suspect that they are in on this scam.
+ PaidContent heard back from Shaun Morgan, who is listed as First Mutual's CEO on the press release, who denies that they made the investment. Was CEO Stan Rosiak confused when we talked with him briefly and he acknowledged the investment and said he would call us back to discuss? Silicon Alley Insider had a similar experience with another contact at First Mutual Jay Leisenberg who told the Insider that AmeriTV is indeed a real company. Still more questions than answers.
+ As do we, Silicon Alley Insider wonders why people would do something like this? Our assumption would be that conmen are looking to raise funding from novice investors and want to people to direct them to evidence that the company exists. But who knows with this story.
+ One other strike against First Mutual's credibility is this: the 'firm' told PaidContent that they had participated in a $20M funding round in Zip Trade Technologies. We saw this announcement last week and investigated ZipTrade. It was the same story. No Web site, and no prior mentions using any manner of search. Obviously a company that raises $20M in series D would have left some footprints on the net. As with the AmeriTV announcement, Zip Trade's funding press release was written by some hack as it makes no sense (not that all press releases make sense but this is a joke.) PaidContent notes that the AmeriTV release was copied and pasted from a Joost release and that the Zip Trade release was copied from a Zend release (nice sleuthing there.)
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Having seen a press release this morning that two named financial firms, plus 3 un-named firms, had put $45M into an outfit called AmeriTV we were puzzled that any number of searches produced nothing on the company and its CEO. Moreover, AmeriTV has no Web site, even though VentureBeat indicates AmeriTV is three years old, has earned $20M in revenue and is profitable. Silicon Alley Insider joins in our state of confusion, speculating that this was a fake press release.

We called Dr. Stan Rosiak, the CEO of one of AmeriTV's stated investors, First Mutual Credit, who told us briefly that indeed AmeriTV is for real and that he would cal us back after he emerged from a meeting. We will of course update when he does.

AmeriTV calls itself the world’s first broadcast-quality Internet TV service and says it is based in New York City. We look forward to getting to the bottom of this.

Read - PEHub