This Pump And Dumper Scammed Teachers Out Of Their Retirement Funds

There was a time when men wore suits to baseball games, and fake gurus dressed themselves in a veneer of respectability and authority.

This is a story involving J.P Morgan, pension funds, and Lehman Brothers. All in an epic pump and dump that puts today’s alt coin hucksters to shame.

Bre-X was a mining penny stock that originally traded on the Alberta Stock Exchange. The company went from trading at $0.30 per share all the way up to $250. And it did this, thanks to media and banking frenzy.

Bre-X Minerals Ltd. was founded by David Walsh in 1989.

The company was unremarkable for the first four years, until it bought property near the Busang River in Borneo, Indonesia.

The project manager and geologist, Michael de Guzman, estimated the site to contain more than 2 million troy ounces of gold. Initial drill results backed this up, but the core samples were rigged.

The initial gold was actually filed off from Guzman’s wedding ring.

From there, the fraud escalated. Guzman, Walsh, and other executives pumped share prices as they continually re-estimated the site’s gold deposits.

In 1995, Bre-X claimed there were 30 million ounces.