RE:Bob M...Crystallex a con job? Making money on an investment has nothing at all to do with the question of it being a con. There are 4,190 variations of Bitcon with tens of thousands or millions of investors and no doubt many have made money. But every single one of them is dependent on the internet and goverenments allowing them to play. They are electronic Beanie Babies and someday people will look back and realize just how stupid they were to buy. But can you make money on a con. Of course and people do that daily. It's not something I participate in or approve of. To each his own.
I took a flight on AA from London to Miami five years or so back. I was flying 200,000 miles a year so was a platinum diamond ++ customer and got upgrades on every flight that had one open. I literally was at the top of the upgrade list for years. So I'm sitting in Business and a guy sits down and starts chatting. HIs name is Marc Oppenheimer and he was running a mining company named Crystallex that had this giant gold deposit at KM88. He doesn't know me from the man in the moon but he tells me how he bought the rights to sue Placer Dome for $25,000 and planned on holding them up for greenmail but alas the price of gold kept going down and eventually PD left after spending $132 million on the project. But the price of gold went up so Oppenheimer kept suing CVG, the government board to get the project. And it's Venezuela so you have to bribe all the generals but if you keep throwing money at them eventually you will get what you paid for. After all, it's South American. He made no bones about CRY being a fraud since day one and no bones about handing $100 bills around like candy at Halloween to all the generals in the country.
Now I was quite familar with the story, everyone in the mining business knew CRY was a fraud. You could go to any gold show and PD would have a booth and they show they owned Las Cristinas and right across from them would be Oppenheimer and CRY claiming that they owned Las Cristinas. I always wondered how the TSX and BCSC let them get away with that, CRY lost every single suit and eventually got the project and the government screwed them. So there is a god and she has a sense of humor.
I like having companies like CRY around because when someone writes them up, you know they are bought and paid for and it's a handy way to find the crooks.