Troops formation is underway, as Investorshub prepares for court battle with Kenneth Eade. A man`s reputation is at stake, together with $400 million. There are other implications, however, related to the outcome of this dispute, and they concern almost everyone who is smart enough to do the due diligence before throwing a bunch of cash in some misty enterprise. Yet, even those people tend to get it wrong more often these days. A contemporary pattern applies – the more information you have at hand, the less you know. On a related subject, there are some people who say that information together with water and energy are the commodities of the future. This is quite true, especially when you combine it with the power of the Internet. An issue exists, however, and it is the problem with misuse of information. This is exactly the problem of Mr. Kenneth Eade.
The man who filed a complaint against Investorshub is an attorney, specializing in securities law, helping small companies to go public, as well as for mergers and acquisitions, private placements etc. The reason he filed the complaint – his name would appear on numerous posts in the website, where he is referred to as a “thief”, “the man behind the scam”, ” the one who stole everyone`s money” and various other accusations on his relationships to a wide set of companies.
On one hand, Mr. Eade states that the claims are false, on the other that these are not random negative comments about him and the companies, but a highly organized structure of people set to destroy his reputation, at the same time preventing him from writing on the forums to defend himself. The result of these actions, according to him, is a loss of present and future clientele and reputation, together with emotional distress. For the above, he believes to be entitled to $400 million for the damages caused by this organized scheme against him.
It is, indeed, true that the attitude towards Mr. Eade on various posts in Investorshub is quite personal, resembling the fight of sworn enemies at some point. This, however, does not necessarily prove that Investorshub led a campaign against him, using contractors and employees. While Kenneth Eade states very clearly the actual damage he claims was inflicted on him through Ihub, there is another underlying question, which the mounting vivid discussions on this topic fail to mention.
The most important question here is not whether it was Ihub personnel or just random subscribers of the website that brought this negative wave for Eade. Nor is the most important question who is right in this dispute. The main question, the one that the court will no doubt focus on – it is about the motives for the posters to drag Mr. Eade`s name and reputation through the mud? The answer to this question is actually the answer of what the outcome of this court trial would be.
This brings us back to the problem with information. On one hand, even if the posters and moderators who badmouthed Eade are, in fact, employees of Ihub, if they stated only true facts, they were actually doing something good, preventing traders from bad investments. So the threat with court can be seen as trying to shut someone`s mouth, when he or she is telling the truth.
The flip side of this coin relates to the motives – even if Ihub contracted people to trash Mr. Eade and the set of companies, why would the website benefit from that? Who actually profits from this public humiliation? Let alone, proving the above will not be very easy at all as it is not really hard to become a moderator in Investorshub, let alone subscribers there use various techniques to hide their ip address, so the court might find it difficult to connect the bashers to the website owners, given that their ip addresses would most probably be 0.00.00.00.
Otherwise, this is nothing new for Ihub and Matthew Brown, the man who founded this website and is up-to-date managing and supervising activities on it. He has similar experience from 2009, when the Securities and Exchange Commission charged him and seven other participants in a stock manipulation ring. What is more, back then Brown pleaded guilty to 4 counts of fraud and money laundering. It is yet to see what the outcome for him will be this time.
The truth of the matter is, though, that the outcome of this trial has much greater implications on traders, rather than both sides involved in it. This is the true beauty and the curse of the Internet. There is everything you want to know out there, but it is increasingly hard to find what you actually need to know.
