Apparently aware of the ruin that is his own reputation, Gary Weiss has taken to battling in favor of illegal stock market manipulation on political blog aggregator DailyKos.com, under the pseudonym “Tom Sykes”.
Weiss has a rich history of abusive sockpuppeting, mostly for the purpose of attacking those who advocate ending illegal naked short selling. At one time, Weiss did this on behalf of the DTCC. 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 tiny handful of ostensibly paid pieces for Portfolio Magazine – a publication whose final coffin nail Weiss personally helped to drive).
And the trend continues up to this very day, with Weiss as Tom Sykes.
To anybody who has followed Weiss for any period of time and come to recognize his overly-ripe writing style, that he and Tom Sykes are one in the same is beyond obvious.
But the Deep Capture team adheres to a higher standard when making such claims with certainty, and so I shall now explain how I can do so now.
Among the many flaws on the Yahoo message boards is one which makes it possible, under specific circumstances, to embed any html code, up to and including javascript, on the site. This, in turn, makes it possible not only to capture the IP address from which a user is accessing the site, but also their Yahoo username.
In other words, one can tie a Yahoo username to a specific IP address, sans ambiguity.
Gary Weiss lives in Greenwich Village, NY, but in August of 2008 he bought a second home upstate (tellingly financed by the property owner, not a bank) in the tiny Sullivan County hamlet of Callicoon Center.
A few months ago, using the above-referenced method, I was able to determine that the Yahoo account belonging to user garyrweiss@verizon.net was accessing the web via IP address 74.64.81.92, which maps to within a few miles of Callicoon Center. Given the tininess of Callicoon Center, this is what one would expect of an instance of Weiss being online at his second home.
(Hint: remember that IP address, for we shall return to it shortly.)
We know that garyrweiss@verizon.net belongs to our Gary Weiss thanks to emails we’ve acquired between Weiss and kindred stock manipulator Floyd Schneider.
With the 15-part series on Dendreon recently completed, and our self-imposed hiatus from posting anything else ended, I decided it was time to prove once and for all that Gary Weiss and Tom Sykes are the same person.
It took a few short hours to hit paydirt.
In short, email sent to tomsykes.kos@gmail.com (the address Tom Sykes lists as his own on dailykos.com) induced the recipient to visit the Yahoo message boards in such a way as to reveal his IP address to me.
The result: 74.64.81.92.
This IP address has been conclusively linked to garyrweiss@verizon.net, which in turn has been conclusively linked to Gary R. Weiss, the bumbling sockpuppeteer and defender of illegal naked short selling.
But wait, there’s more.
Among Weiss’s most notable accomplishments has been epic sockpuppeting on Wikipedia in order to cover-up evidence of the damaging impact of illegal naked short selling. Once this finally came to light, Weiss and his home IP address range, which is well known, were unambiguously banned from editing Wikipedia.
But what about Weiss’s new IP address, tied to his new, second home?
Well, as we’d expect, realizing that it was unknown by Wikipedia administrators, Weiss used it, on two occasions, to remove references to Mark Mitchell’s Dendreon-related reporting on deepcapture.com, which had been previously added to the Wikipedia article on Michael Milken. To see these edits for yourself, follow this link, which will show you the only two contributions made by IP address 74.64.81.92. To see the substance of the edits, click on the links that say “diff”. What you’ll then see is a before and after comparison, with the text in yellow being what 74.64.81.92 (Weiss) removed.
What could possibly be motivating Weiss to carry on in this manner?
I see one of two possibilities: either he’s like the 80-year-old Japanese soldier living in the jungles of Guam who refuses to accept that his “side” lost the war, or – as I suspect – he remains in active contact with his “side,” which remains mobilized and intent on subverting all that we’ve accomplished.
So what next?
Well, obviously, the editorial staff at dailykos.com will want to know that they’ve given forum to a deeply conflicted contributor who – beyond simply using a pseudonym – is actively pretending not to be Gary Weiss by referring to Weiss in the third person and linking to his own blog as though it were actually really relevant. You can let them know what we’ve discovered about Mr. Sykes by going here.
In addition, any active Wikipedians among you will probably want to make it known there that 74.64.81.92 is in fact the dread sockpuppet Mantanmoreland/Gary Weiss.
Finally, I’d simply suggest the Deep Capture community understand that there are many who are actively working – usually anonymously – to discredit the market reform movement. I encourage you to seek out and bring instances of such to our attention, so that we can investigate further when warranted, in order to better understand their real motives.
And as a postscript, I wish to thank Gary Weiss for being so very predictable. His consistently reptilian-brain-based responses to my occasional prodding has made this aspect of my job not only productive, but very enjoyable, as well.
UPDATE: Both Tom Sykes and Gary Weiss are “separately” expressing outrage at this situation tonight. I encourage each of you to make use of “their” blogs’ comment functions to let “them” know what you think about how “they” have been lying to you.