Wednesday, December 17, 2014

About that taqiyyah-ing "whiz kid" who a dumb reporter told us made $72M


From the pic of the guy, you would think he looks more like a 40 yr old than a teen.  When the story first appeared a few days ago in the financial segment of our online news world,  I had read only the headline and not bothered to read the story itself and had wondered how he could have made that much money .... but then knowing how our stock markets are manipulated I thought that the teenager's account must be  handled by a parent with insider trading info who was using the kid's identity to escape detection of their crime and now that the cat's out of the bag, the family would be in deep doodoo.

Well, well, well .... it turns out that a dumb reporter was taqiyyah-ed to by the teen and the dumb reporter's report was picked up by other equally dumb reporters and news outlets around the world and the story started making the rounds everywhere until someone put their noodle to better use than believing everything one reads and decided to investigate.  

From YahooFinance:
Mo Islam, the 17-year-old "whiz kid" investor who suggested he'd made $72 million trading stocks on his high school lunch breaks, admits now he made much less than that.

As in, zero.

After a long day in the media spotlight, Islam admitted to the New York Observer late Monday night that the whole thing had been a fabrication and that he had not made anything at all trading stocks.

"The people I'm most sorry for is my parents. I did something where I can no longer gain their trust," he told the magazine in a question-and-answer session at the office of a public relations firm.
The controversy started with a New York magazine article that suggested Islam was fabulously wealthy for a boy his age, the result of astute stock picking at school.
But skeptics pounced on the story almost immediately, and in a CNBC interview at midday Monday, Islam said the New York article was not accurate. He intimated that his trades had netted a few million dollars but dodged repeated questions.
(Late Tuesday morning, New York posted an apology   to readers in which it said it had been duped.)

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