September 6th, 1996. Eddie Murray, of the Baltimore Orioles, is at bat. He has
had 20 home runs in the season; 499 in his career. Anticipation for the 500th
had been building for the last week. It would make Murray only the third player
to reach 500 home runs and 3000 hits. His career RBI would land in the top ten
hitters in the history of the sport; his 500th home run was a statistical
inevitability. Less foreseeable was the ball's glancing path through one of the
most famous stories of the telephone business.
Statistics only tell you what might happen. Michael Lasky had made a career, a
very lucrative one, of telling people what would happen. Lasky would have
that ball. As usual, he made it happen by advertising.
Clearing right field, the ball landed in the hands of Dan Jones, a salesman
from Towson, Maryland. Despite his vocation, he didn't immediately view his
spectacular catch in financial terms. He told a newspaper reporter that he
looked forward to meeting Murray, getting some signatures, some memorabilia.
Instead, he got offers. At least three parties inquired about purchasing the
ball, but the biggest offer came far from discreetly: an ad in the Baltimore
Sun offering half a million dollars to whoever had it. Well, the offer was
actually for a $25,000 annuity for 20 years, with a notional cash value of half
a million but a time-adjusted value of $300,000 or less. I couldn't tell for
sure, but given events that would follow, it seems unlikely that Jones ever
received more than a few of the payments anyway. Still, the half a million made
headlines, and NPV or not the sale price still set the record for a public sale
of sports memorabilia.
Lasky handled his new purchase with his signature sense of showmanship. He held
a vote, a telephone vote: two 1-900 numbers, charging $0.95 a call, allowed the
public to weigh in on whether he should donate the ball to the Babe Ruth
Birthplace museum or display it in the swanky waterfront hotel he part-owned.
The proceeds went to charity, and after the museum won the poll, the ball did
too. The whole thing was a bit of a publicity stunt, Lasky thrived on unsubtle
displays and he could part with the money. His 1-900 numbers were bringing in
over $100 million a year.
Lasky's biography is obscure. Born 1942 in Brooklyn, he moved to Baltimore in
the 1960s for some reason connected to a conspicuous family business: a blood
bank. Perhaps the blood bank was a grift, it's hard to say now, but Lasky
certainly had a unique eye for business. He was fond of horse racing, or
really, of trackside betting. His father, a postal worker, had a proprietary
theory of mathematics that he applied to predicting the outcome of the race.
This art, or science, or sham, is called handicapping, and it became Lasky's
first real success. Under the pseudonym Mike Warren, he published the
Baltimore Bulletin, a handicapping newsletter advertising sure bets at all
the region's racetracks.
Well, there were some little details of this business, some conflicts of
interest, a little infringement on the trademark of the Preakness. The details
are neither clear nor important, but he had some trouble with the racing
commissions in at least three states. He probably wouldn't have tangled with
them at all if he weren't stubbornly trying to hold down a license to breed
racehorses while also running a betting cartel, but Lasky was always driven
more by passion than reason.
Besides, he had other things going. Predicting the future in print was sort of
an industry vertical, and he diversified. His mail-order astrology operation
did well, before the Postal Service shut it down. He ran some sort of sports
pager service, probably tied to betting, and I don't know what came of that.
Perhaps on the back of a new year's resolution, he ran a health club, although
it collapsed in 1985 with a bankruptcy case that revealed some, well,
questionable practices. Strange that a health club just weeks away from
bankruptcy would sell so many multi-year memberships, paid up front. And where
did that money go, anyway?
No matter, Lasky was onto the next thing. During the 1980s, changes had
occurred that would grow Lasky's future-predicting portfolio into a staple of
American media. First, in 1984, a Reagan-era FCC voted to end most regulation
of television advertising. Gone was the limit of 16 minutes per hour of paid
programming. An advertiser could now book entire half-hour schedule slots.
Second, during the early '80s AT&T standardized and promoted a new model in
telephone billing. The premium-rate number, often called a "1-900 number" after
the NPA assigned for their use, incurred a callee-determined per-minute toll
that the telco collected and paid on to the callee. It's a bit like a nascent
version of "Web 3.0": telephone microtransactions, an innovative new way to pay
for information services.
It seems like a fair assumption that handicapping brought Lasky to the 1-900
racket, and he certainly did offer betting tip lines. But he had learned a
thing or two from the astrology business, even if it ran afoul of Big Postal.
Handicapping involved a surprising amount of work, and its marketing centered
around the supposedly unique insight of the handicapper. Fixed recordings of
advice could only keep people on a telephone line for so long, anyway.
Astrology, though, involved even fewer facts, and even more opportunity to
ramble. Best of all, there was an established industry of small-time psychics
working out of their homes. With the magic of the telephone, every one of them
could offer intuitive readings to all of America, for just $3.99 a minute.
In 1990, Lasky's new "direct response marketing" company Inphomation, Inc.
contracted five-time Grammy winner Dionne Warwick, celebrity psychic Linda
Georgian, and a studio audience to produce a 30 minute talk-show "infomercial"
promoting the Psychic Friends Network. Over the next few years, Inphomation
conjoined with an ad booking agency and a video production company under the
ownership of Mike Lasky's son, Marc Lasky. Inphomation spent as much as a
million a week in television bookings, promoting a knitting machine and a
fishing lure and sports tips, but most of all psychics. The original half-hour
Psychic Friends Network spot is often regarded as the most successful
infomercial in history. It remade Warwick's reputation, turning her from a
singer to a psychic promoter. Calls to PFN's 1-900 number, charged at various
rates that could reach over $200 an hour, brought in $140 million in revenue in
its peak years of the mid 1990s.
Lasky described PFN as an innovative new business model, but it's one we now
easily recognize as "gig work." Telephone psychics, recruited mostly by
referral from the existing network, worked from home, answering calls on their
own telephones. Some read Tarot, some gazed into crystals, others did nothing
at all, but the important thing was that they kept callers on the line. After
the phone company's cut and Inphomation's cut, they were paid a share of the
per-minute rate that automatically appeared on caller's monthly phone bills.
A lot of people, and even some articles written in the last decade, link the
Psychic Friends Network to "Miss Cleo." There's sort of a "Berenstain Bears"
effect happening here; as widely as we might remember Miss Cleo's PFN
appearances there are no such thing. Miss Cleo was actually the head psychic
and spokeswoman of the Psychic Reader's Network, which would be called a
competitor to the Psychic Friends Network except that they didn't operate at
the same time. In the early '00s, the Psychic Reader's Network collapsed in
scandal. The limitations of its business model, a straightforward con,
eventually caught up. It was sued out of business by a dozen states, then the
FTC, then the FCC just for good measure.
The era of the 1-900 number was actually rather short. By the late '80s, it had
already become clear that the main application of premium rate calling was not
stock quotations or paid tech support or referral services. It was scams. An
extremely common genre of premium rate number, almost the lifeblood of the
industry, were joke lines that offered telephonic entertainment in the voice of
cartoon characters. Advertisements for these numbers, run during morning
cartoons, advised children to call right away. Their parents wouldn't find out
until the end of the month, when the phone bill came and those jokes turned out
to have run $50 in 1983's currency. Telephone companies were at first called
complicit in the grift, but eventually bowed to pressure and, in 1987, made it
possible for consumers to block 1-900 calling on their phone service. Of
course, few telephone customers took advantage, and the children's joke line
racket went on into the early '90s when a series of FTC lawsuits finally scared
most of them off the telephone network.
Adult entertainment was another touchstone of the industry, although adult
lines did not last as long on 1-900 numbers as we often remember. Ripping off
adults via their children is one thing; smut is a vice. AT&T and MCI, the
dominant long distance carriers and thus the companies that handled most 1-900
call volume, largely cut off phone sex lines by 1991. Congress passed a law
requiring telephone carriers to block them by default anyway, but of course
left other 1-900 services as is. Phone sex lines were far from gone, of course,
but they had to find more nuanced ways to make their revenue: international
rates and complicit telephone carriers, dial-around long distance revenue, and
whatever else they could think of that regulators hadn't caught up to yet.
When Miss Cleo and her Psychic Reader's Network launched in 1997, psychics were
still an "above board" use of the 1-900 number. The Psychic Readers lived to
see the end of that era. In the late '90s, regulations changed to make unpaid
1-900 bills more difficult to collect. By 2001, some telephone carriers had
dropped psychic lines from their networks as a business decision. The bill
disputes simply weren't worth the hassle. In 2002, AT&T ended 1-900 billing
entirely. Other carriers maintained premium-rate billing for a decade later,
but AT&T had most of the customer volume anyway.
The Psychic Friends Network, blessed by better vision, struck at the right
time. 1990 to 1997 were the golden age of 1-900 and the golden age of
Inphomation. Inphomation's three-story office building in Baltimore had a
conference room with a hand-painted ceiling fresco of cherubs and clouds. In
the marble-lined lobby, a wall of 25 televisions played Inphomation
infomercials on repeat. At its peak, the Psychic Friends Network routed calls
to 2,000 independent psychic contractors. Dionne Warwick and Linda Georgian
were famous television personalities; Warwick wasn't entirely happy about her
association with the brand but she made royalties whenever the infomercial
aired. Some customers spent tens of thousands of dollars on psychic advice.
In 1993, a direct response marketing firm called Regal Communications made a
deal to buy Inphomation. The deal went through, but just the next year Regal
spun their entire 1-900 division off, and Inphomation exercised an option to
become an independent company once again. A decade later, many of Regal's
executives would face SEC charges over the details of Regal's 1-900 business,
foreshadowing a common tendency of Psychic Friends Network owners.
The psychic business, it turns out, was not so unlike the handicapping
business. Both were unsavory. Both made most of their money off of addicts. In
the press, Lasky talked about casual fans that called for two minutes here and
there. What's $5 for a little fun? You might even get some good advice.
Lawsuits, regulatory action, and newspaper articles told a different story. The
"30 free minutes" promotion used to attract new customers only covered the
first two minutes of each call, the rest were billed at an aggressive rate. The
most important customers stayed on the line for hours. Callers had to sit
through a few minutes of recordings, charged at the full rate, before being
connected to a psychic who drew out the conversation by speaking slowly and
asking inane questions. Some psychics seem to have approached their job rather
sincerely, but others apparently read scripts.
And just like the horse track, the whole thing moved a lot of money. Lasky
continued to tussle with racing commissions over his thoroughbred horses. He
bought a Mercedes, a yacht, a luxury condo, a luxury hotel whose presidential
suite he used as an apartment, a half-million-dollar baseball. Well, a $300,000
baseball, at least.
Eventually, the odds turned against Lasky. Miss Cleo's Psychic Reader's Network
was just one of the many PFN lookalikes that popped up in the late '90s. There
was a vacuum to fill, because in 1997, Inphomation was descending into
bankruptcy.
Opinions differ on Lasky's management and leadership. He was a visionary at
least once, but later decisions were more variable. Bringing infomercial
production in-house through his son's Pikesville Pictures might have improved
creative control, but production budgets ballooned and projects ran late. PFN
was still running mainly off of the Dionne Warwick shows, which were feeling
dated, especially after a memorable 1993 Saturday Night Live parody featuring
Christopher Walken. Lasky's idea for a radio show, the Psychic Friends Radio
Network, had a promising trial run but then faltered on launch. Hardly a half
dozen radio stations picked it up, and it lost Inphomation tens of millions of
dollars. While they were years ahead of the telephone industry cracking down on
psychics, PFN still struggled with a timeless trouble of the telephone network:
billing.
AT&T had a long-established practice of withholding a portion of 1-900 revenue
for chargebacks. Some customers see the extra charges on their phone bills and
call in with complaints; the telephone company, not really being the
beneficiary of the revenue anyway, was not willing to go to much trouble to
keep it and often agreed to a refund. Holding, say, 10% of a callee's 1-900
billings in reserve allowed AT&T to offer these refunds without taking a loss.
The psychic industry, it turned out, was especially prone to end-of-month
customer dissatisfaction. Chargebacks were so frequent that AT&T raised
Inphomation's withholding to 20%, 30%, and even 40% of revenue.
At least, that's how AT&T told it. Lasky always seemed skeptical, alleging that
the telephone companies were simply refusing to hand over money Inphomation was
owed, making themselves a free loan. Inphomation brokered a deal to move their
business elsewhere, signing an exclusive contract with MCI. MCI underdelivered:
they withheld just as much revenue, in violation of the contract according to
Lasky, and besides the MCI numbers suffered from poor quality and dropped
calls. At least, that's how Inphomation told it. Maybe the dropped calls were
on Inphomation's end, and maybe they had a convenient positive effect on
revenue as callers paid for a few minute of recordings before being connected
to no one at all. By the time the Psychic Friends Network fell apart, there was
a lot of blame passed around. Lasky would eventually prevail in a lawsuit
against MCI for unpaid revenue, but not until too late.
By some combination of a lack of innovation in their product, largely unchanged
since 1991, and increasing expenses for both advertising and its founder's
lifestyle, Inphomation ended 1997 over $20 million in the red. In 1998 they
filed for Chapter 11, and Lasky sought to reorganize the company as
debtor-in-possession.
The bankruptcy case brought out some stories of Lasky's personal behavior.
While some employees stood by him as a talented salesman and apt finder of
opportunities, others had filed assault charges. Those charges were later
dropped, but by many accounts, he had quite a temper. Lasky's habit of not just
carrying but brandishing a handgun around the office certainly raised eyebrows.
Besides, his expensive lifestyle persisted much too far into Inphomation's
decline. The bankruptcy judge's doubts about Lasky reached a head when it was
revealed that he had tried to hide the company's assets. Much of the
infrastructure and intellectual property of the Psychic Friends Network, and no
small amount of cash, had been transferred to the newly formed Friends of
Friends LLC in the weeks before bankruptcy.
The judge also noticed some irregularities. The company controller had been
sworn in as treasurer, signed the bankruptcy petition, and then resigned as
treasurer in the space of a few days. When asked why the company chose this odd
maneuver over simply having Lasky, corporate president, sign the papers, Lasky
had trouble recalling the whole thing. He also had trouble recalling loans
Inphomation had taken, meetings he had scheduled, and actions he had taken.
When asked about Inphomation's board of directors, Lasky didn't know who they
were, or when they had last met.
The judge used harsh language. "I've seen nothing but evidence of concealment,
dishonesty, and less than full disclosure... I have no hope this debtor can
reorganize with the present management." Lasky was removed, and a receiver
appointed to manage Inphomation through a reorganization that quietly turned
into a liquidation. And that was almost the end of the Psychic Friends
Network.
The bankruptcy is sometimes attributed to Lasky's failure to adapt to the
times, but PFN wasn't entirely without innovation. The Psychic Friends Network
first went online, at psychicfriendsnetwork.com, in 1997. This website,
launched in the company's final days, offered not only the PFN's 1-900 number
but a landing page for a telephone-based version of "Colorgenics." Colorgenics
was a personality test based on the "Lüscher color test," an assessment
designed by a Swiss psychotherapist based on nothing in particular. There are
dozens of colorgenics tests online today, many of which make various attempts
to extract money from the user, but none with quite the verve of a color quiz
via 1-900 number.
Inphomation just didn't quite make it in the internet age, or at least not
directly. Most people know 1998 as the end of the Psychic Friends Network. The
Dionne Warwick infomercials were gone, and that was most of PFN anyway. Without
Linda Georgian, could PFN live on? Yes, it turns out, but not in its living
form. The 1998 bankruptcy marked PFN's transition from a scam to the specter of
a scam, and then to a whole different kind of scam. It was the beginning of the
PFN's zombie years.
In 1999, Inphomation's assets were liquidated at auction for $1.85 million, a
far cry from the company's mid-'90s valuations in the hundreds of millions.
The buyer: Marc Lasky, Michael Lasky's son. PFN assets became part of PFN
Holdings Inc., with Michael Lasky and Marc Lasky as officers. PFN was back.
It does seem that the Laskys made a brief second crack at a 1-900 business, but
by 1999 the tide was clearly against expensive psychic hotlines. Telephone
companies had started their crackdown, and attorney general lawsuits were
brewing. Besides, after the buyout PFN Holdings didn't have much capital, and
doesn't seem to have done much in the way of marketing. It's obscure what
happened in these years, but I think the Laskys licensed out the PFN name.
psychicfriendsnetwork.com, from 2002 to around 2009, directed visitors to Keen.
Keen was the Inphomation of the internet age, what Inphomation probably would
have been if they had run their finances a little better in '97. Backed by $60
million in venture funding from names like Microsoft and eBay, Keen was a
classic dotcom startup. They launched in '99 with the ambitious and original
idea of operating a web directory and reference library. Like most of the
seemingly endless number of reference website startups, they had to pivot to
something else. Unlike most of the others, Keen and their investors had a
relaxed set of moral strictures about the company's new direction. In the early
2000s, keen.com was squarely in the ethical swamp that had been so well
explored by the 1-900 business. Their web directory specialized in phone sex
and psychic advice---all offered by 1-800 numbers with convenient credit card
payment, a new twist on the premium phone line model that bypassed the vagaries
and regulations of telephone billing.
Keen is, incidentally, still around today. They'll broker a call or chat with
empath/medium Citrine Angel, offering both angel readings and clairsentience,
just $1 for the first 5 minutes and $2.99 a minute thereafter. That's actually
a pretty good deal compared to the Psychic Friends Network's old rates. Keen's
parent company, Ingenio, runs a half dozen psychic advice websites and a habit
tracking app. But it says something about the viability of online psychics
that Keen still seems to do most of their business via phone. Maybe the
internet is not as much of a blessing for psychics as it seems, or maybe they
just haven't found quite the right business model.
The Laskys enjoyed a windfall during PFN's 2000s dormancy. In 2004, the
Inphomation bankruptcy estate settled its lawsuit against bankrupt MCI for
withholding payments. The Laskys made $4 million. It's hard to say where that
money went, maybe to backing Marc's Pikesville Pictures production company.
Pikesville picked up odd jobs producing television commercials, promotional
documentaries, and an extremely strange educational film intended to prepare
children to testify in court. I only know about this because parts of it appear
in the video "Marc Lasky Demo Reel," uploaded to YouTube by "Mike Warren," the
old horse race handicapping pseudonym of Michael Lasky. It has 167 views, and a
single comment, "my dad made this." That was Gabriela Lasky, Marc's daughter.
It's funny how much of modern life plays out on YouTube, where Marc's own
account uploaded the full run of PFN infomercials.
Some of that $4 million in MCI money might have gone into the Psychic Friends
Networks' reboot. In 2009, Marc Lasky produced a new series of television
commercials for PFN. "The legendary Psychic Friends Network is back, bigger and
bolder than ever." An extremely catchy jingle goes "all new, all improved, all
knowing: call the Psychic Friends Network." On PFN 2.0, you can access your
favorite psychic whenever you wish, on your laptop, computer, on your mobile,
or on your tablet.
These were decidedly modernized, directing viewers to text a keyword to an SMS
shortcode or visit psychicfriendsnetwork.com, where they could set up real-time
video consultations with PFN's network of advisors. Some referred to
"newpfn.com" instead, perhaps because it was easier to type, or perhaps there
was some dispute around the Keen deal. There were still echoes of the original
1990s formula. The younger Lasky seemed to be hunting for a new celebrity lead
like Warwick, but having trouble finding one. Actress Vivica A. Fox appeared in
one spot, but then sent a cease and desist and went to the press alleging that
her likeness was used without her permission. Well, they got her to record the
lines somehow, but maybe they never paid. Maybe she found out about PFN's
troubled reputation after the shoot. In any case, Lasky went hunting again and
landed on Puerto Rican astrologer and television personality Walter Mercado.
Mercado, coming off something like Liberace if he was a Spanish-language TV
host, sells the Psychic Friends Network to a Latin beat and does a hell of a
job of it. He was a recognizable face in the Latin-American media due to his
astrology show, syndicated for many years by Univision, and he appears in a
sparkling outfit that lets him deliver the line "the legend is back" with far
more credibility than anyone else in the new PFN spots. He was no Dionne
Warwick, though, and the 2009 PFN revival sorely lacked the production quality
or charm of the '90s infomercial. It seems to have had little impact; this
iteration of PFN is so obscure that many histories of the company are
completely unaware of it.
Elsewhere, in Nevada, an enigmatic figure named Ya Tao Chang had incorporated
Web Wizards Inc. I can tell you almost nothing about this; Chang is impossible
to research and Web Wizards left no footprints. All I know is that, somehow,
Web Wizards made it to a listing on the OTC securities market. In 2012, PFN
Holdings needed money and, to be frank, I think that Chang needed a real
business. Or, at least, something that looked like one. In a reverse-merger,
PFN Holdings joined Web Wizards and renamed to Psychic Friends Network Inc.,
PFNI on the OTC bulletin board.
The deal was financed by Right Power Services, a British Virgin Islands company
(or was it a Singapore company? accounts disagree), also linked to Chang.
Supposedly, there were millions in capital. Supposedly, exciting things were to
come for PFN.
Penny stocks are stocks that trade at low prices, under $5 or even more
classically under $1. Because these prices are too low to quality for listing
on exchanges, they trade on less formal, and less heavily regulated,
over-the-counter markets. Related to penny stocks are microcap stocks, stocks
of companies with very small market capitalizations. These companies, being
small and obscure, typically see miniscule trading volumes as well.
The low price, low volume, and thus high volatility of penny stocks makes them
notoriously prone to manipulation. Fraud is rampant on OTC markets, and if you
look up a few microcap names it's not hard to fall into a sort of alternate
corporate universe. There exists what I call the "pseudocorporate world," an
economy that relates to "real" business the same way that pseudoscience relates
to science. Pseudocorporations have much of the ceremony of their legitimate
brethren, but none of the substance. They have boards, executives, officers,
they issue press releases, they publish annual reports. What they conspicuously
lack is a product, or a business. Like NFTs or memecoins, they are purely
tokens for speculation, and that speculation is mostly pumping and dumping.
Penny stock pseudocompanies intentionally resemble real ones; indeed, their
operation, to the extent that they have one, is to manufacture the appearance
of operating. They announce new products, that will never materialize, they
announce new partnerships, that will never amount to anything, they announce
mergers, that never close. They also rearrange their executive leadership with
impressive frequency, due in no small part to the tendency of those leaders to
end up in trouble with the SEC. All of this means that it's very difficult to
untangle their history, and often hard to tell if they were once real companies
that were hollowed out and exploited by con men, or whether they were a sham
all along.
Web Wizards does not appear to have had any purpose prior to its merger with
PFN, and as part of the merger deal the Laskys became the executive leadership
of the new company. They seem to have legitimately approached the transaction
as a way to raise capital for PFN, because immediately after the merger they
announced PFN's ambitious future. This new PFN would be an all-online operation
using live webcasts and 1:1 video calling. The PFN website became a landing
page for their new membership service, and the Laskys were primed to produce a
new series of TV spots. Little more would ever be heard of this.
In 2014, PFN Inc renamed itself to "Peer to Peer Network Inc.," announcing
their intent to capitalize on PFN's early gig work model by expanding the
company into other "peer to peer" industries. The first and only venture Peer
to Peer Network (PTOP on OTC Pink) announced was an acquisition of 321Lend, a
silicon valley software startup that intended to match accredited investors
with individuals needing loans. Neither company seems to have followed up on
the announcement, and a year later 321Lend announced its acquisition by
Loans4Less, so it doesn't seem that the deal went through.
I might be reading too much between the lines, but I think there was a conflict
between the Laskys, who had a fairly sincere intent to operate the PFN as a
business, and the revolving odd lot of investors and executives that seem to
grow like mold on publicly-traded microcap companies.
Back in 2010, a stockbroker named Joshua Sodaitis started work on a transit
payment and routing app called "Freemobicard." In 2023, he was profiled in
Business Leaders Review, one of dozens of magazines, podcasts, YouTube
channels, and Medium blogs that exist to provide microcap executives with
uncritical interviews that create the resemblance of notability. The Review
says Sodaitis "envisioned a future where seamless, affordable, and sustainable
transportation would be accessible to all." Freemobicard, the article tells us,
has "not only transformed the way people travel but has also contributed to
easing traffic congestion and reducing carbon emissions."
It never really says what Freemobicard actually is, but that doesn't matter,
because by the time it gets involved in our story Sodaitis had completely
forgotten about the transportation thing anyway.
In 2015, disagreements between the psychic promoters and the stock promoters
had come to a head. Attributing the move to differences in business vision, the
Laskys bought the Psychic Friends Network assets out of Peer to Peer Network
for $20,000 and resigned their seats on PTOP's board. At about the same time,
PTOP announced a "licensing agreement" with a software company called
Code2Action. The licensing agreement somehow involved Code2Action's CEO,
Christopher Esposito, becoming CEO of PTOP itself. At this point Code2Action
apparently rolled up operations, making the "licensing agreement" more of a
merger, but the contract as filed with the SEC does indeed read as a license
agreement. This is just one of the many odd and confusing details of PTOP's
post-2015 corporate governance.
I couldn't really tell you who Christopher Esposito is or where he came from,
but he seems to have had something to do with Joshua Sodaitis, because he would
eventually bring Sodaitis along as a board member. More conspicuously,
Code2Action's product was called Mobicard---or Freemobicard, depending on which
press release you read. This Mobicard was a very different one, though. Prior
to the merger it was some sort of SMS marketing product (a "text this keyword
to this shortcode" type of autoresponse/referral service), but as PTOP renamed
itself to Mobicard Inc. (or at least announced the intent to, I don't think the
renaming ever actually happened) the vision shifted to the lucrative world of
digital business cards. Their mobile app, Mobicard 1.0, allowed business
professionals to pay a monthly fee to hand out a link to a basic profile
webpage with contact information and social media links. Kind of like Linktree,
but with LinkedIn vibes, higher prices, and less polish.
One of the things you'll notice about Mobicard is that, for a software company,
they were pretty short on software engineers. Every version of the products
(and they constantly announce new ones, with press releases touting Mobicard
1.5, 1.7, and 2.0) seems to have been contracted to a different low-end
software house. There are demo videos of various iterations of Mobicard, and
they are extremely underwhelming. I don't think it really mattered, PTOP didn't
expect Mobicard to make money. Making money is not the point of a microcap
pseudocompany.
That same year, Code2Action signed another license agreement, much like the
PTOP deal, but with a company called Cannabiz. Or maybe J M Farms Patient
Group, the timeline is fuzzy. This was either a marketing company for medical
marijuana growers or a medical marijuana grower proper, probably varying before
and after they were denied a license by the state of Massachusetts on account
of the criminal record of one of the founders. The whole cannabis aside only
really matters because, first, it matches the classic microcap scam pattern of
constantly pivoting to whatever is new and hot (which was, for a time, newly
legalized cannabis), and second, because a court would later find that Cannabiz
was a vehicle for securities fraud.
Esposito had a few years of freedom first, though, to work on his new Peer to
Peer Network venture. He made the best of it: PTOP issued a steady stream of
press releases related to contracts for Mobicard development, the appointment
of various new executives, and events as minor as having purchased a new domain
name. Despite the steady stream of mentions in the venerable pages of
PRNewswire, PTOP doesn't seem to have actually done anything. In 2015, 2016,
2017, and 2018, PTOP failed to complete financial audits and SEC reports. To be
fair, in 2016 Esposito was fined nearly $100,000 by the SEC as part of a larger
case against Cannabiz and its executives. He must have had a hard time getting
to the business chores of PTOP, especially since he had been barred from stock
promotion.
In 2018, with PTOP on the verge of delisting due to the string of late audits,
Joshua Sodaitis was promoted to CEO and Chairman of "Peer to Peer Network,
Inc., (Stock Ticker Symbol PTOP) a.k.a. Mobicard," "the 1st and ONLY publicly
traded digital business card company." PTOP's main objective became maintaining
its public listing, and for a couple of years most discussion of the actual
product stopped.
In 2020, PTOP made the "50 Most Admired Companies" in something called "The
Silicon Valley Review," which I assume is prestigious and conveniently offers a
10% discount if you nominate your company for one of their many respected
awards right now. "This has been a monumental year for the company," Sodaitis
said, announcing that they had been granted two (provisional) patents and
appointed a new advisory board (including one member "who is self-identified as
a progressive millennial" and another who was a retired doctor). The bio of
Sodaitis mentions the Massachusetts medical marijuana venture, using the name
of the company that was denied a license and shuttered by the SEC, not the
reorganized replacement. Sodaitis is not great with details.
It's hard to explain Mobicard because of this atmosphere of confusion. There
was the complete change in product concept, which is itself confusing, since
Sodaitis seems to have given the interview where he discussed Mobicard as a
transportation app well after he had started describing it as a digital
business card. Likewise, Mobicard has a remarkable number of distinct websites.
freemobicard.com, mobicard.com, ptopnetwork.com, and mobicards.ca all seem
oddly unaware of each other, and as the business plan continues to morph, are
starting to disagree on what mobicard even is. The software contractor or staff
developing the product keep changing, as does the version of mobicard they are
about to launch. And on top of it all are the press releases.
Oh, the press releases. There's nary a Silicon Valley grift unmentioned in
PTOP's voluminous newswire output. Crypto, the Metaverse, and AI all make
appearances as part of the digital business card vision. As for the tone, the
headlines speak for themselves.
"MOBICARD Set for Explosive Growth in 2024"
"MobiCard's Digital Business Card Revolutionizes Networking & Social Media"
"MOBICARD Revolutionizes Business Cards"
"Peer To Peer Network, aka Mobicard™ Announces Effective Form C Filing with the
SEC and Launch of Reg CF Crowdfunding Campaign"
"Joshua Sodaitis, Mobicard, Inc. Chairman and CEO: 'We’re Highly Committed to
Keeping Our 'One Source Networking Solution' Relevant to the Ever-Changing
Dynamics of Personal and Professional Networking'"
"PTOP ANNOUNCES THE RESUBMISSION OF THE IMPROVED MOBICARD MOBILE APPS TO THE
APPLE STORE AND GOOGLE PLAY"
"Mobicard™ Experienced 832% User Growth in Two Weeks"
"Peer To Peer Network Makes Payment to Attorney To File A Provisional Patent
for Innovative Technology"
Yes, this company issues a press release when they pay an invoice. To be fair,
considering the history of bankruptcy, maybe that's more of an achievement than
it sounds.
In one "interview" with a "business magazine," Sodaitis talks about why
Mobicard has taken so long to reach maturity. It's the Apple app store review,
he explains, a story to which numerous iOS devs will no doubt relate. Besides,
based on their press releases, they have had to switch contractors and
completely redevelop the product multiple times. I didn't know that the digital
business card was such a technical challenge. Sodaitis has been working on it
for perhaps as long as fifteen years and still hasn't quite gotten to MVP.
You know where this goes, don't you? After decades of shady characters, trouble
with regulators, cosplaying at business, and outright scams, there's only one
way the story could possibly end.
All the way back in 2017, PTOP announced that they were "Up 993.75% After
Launch Of Their Mobicoin Cryptocurrency." PTOP, the release continues, "saw a
truly Bitcoin-esque move today, completely outdoing the strength of every other
stock trading on the OTC market." PTOPs incredible market move was, of course,
from $0.0005 to $0.0094. With 22 billion shares of common stock outstanding,
that gave PTOP a valuation of over $200 million my the timeless logic of the
crypto investor.
Of course, PTOP wasn't giving up on their OTC listing, and with declining
Bitcoin prices their interest in the cryptocurrency seems to have declined as
well. That was, until the political and crypto market winds shifted yet again.
Late last year, PTOP was newly describing Mobicoin as a utility token. In
November, they received a provisional patent on "A Cryptocurrency-Based
Platform for Connecting Companies and Social Media Users for Targeted Marketing
Campaigns." This is the latest version of Mobicard. As far as I can tell, it's
now a platform where people are paid in cryptocurrency for tweeting advertising
on behalf of a brand.
PTOP had to beef up their crypto expertise for this exciting new frontier.
Last year, they hired "Renowned Crypto Specialist DeFi Mark," proprietor of a
cryptocurrency casino and proud owner of 32,000 Twitter followers. "With Peer
To Peer Network, we're poised to unleash the power of blockchain, likely
triggering a significant shift in the general understanding of web3," he said.
"I have spoken to our Senior Architect Jay Wallace who is a genius at what he
does and he knows that we plan to Launch Mobicard 1.7 with the MOBICOIN fully
implemented shortly after the New President is sworn into office. I think
this is a great time to reintroduce the world to MOBICOIN™ regardless of how
I, or anyone feels about politics we can't deny the Crypto markets
exceptional increase in anticipation to major regulatory transformations. I
made it very clear to our Tech Team leader that this is a must to launch
Mobicard™ 1.7.
Well, they've outdone themselves. Just two weeks ago, they announced Mobicard
2.0. "With enhanced features like real-time analytics, seamless MOBICOIN™
integration, and enterprise-level onboarding for up to 999 million employees,
this platform is positioned to set new standards in the digital business card
industry."
And how does that cryptocurrency integration work?
"Look the Mobicard™ Reward system is simple. We had something like it
previously implemented back in 2017. If a MOBICARD™ user shares his MOBICARD™
50 times in one week then he will be rewarded with 50 MOBICOIN's. If a
MOBICARD user attends a conference and shares his digital business card
MOBICARD™ with 100 people he will be granted 100 MOBICOIN™'s."
Yeah, it's best not to ask.
I decided to try out this innovative new digital business card experience,
although I regret to say that the version in the Play Store is only 1.5. I'm
sure they're just waiting on app store review. The dashboard looks pretty good,
although I had some difficulty actually using it. I have not so far been able
to successfully create a digital business card, and most of the tabs just lead
to errors, but I have gained access to four or five real estate brokers and
CPAs via the "featured cards." One of the featured cards is for Christopher
Esposito, listed as "Crypto Dev" at NRGai.
Somewhere around 2019, Esposito brought Code2Action back to life again. He
promoted a stock offering, talking up the company's bright future and many
promising contracts. You might remember that this is exactly the kind of thing
that the SEC got him for in 2016, and the SEC dutifully got him again. He was
sentenced to five of probation after a court found that he had lied about a
plan to merge Code2Action with another company and taken steps to conceal the
mass sale of his own stock in the company.
NRGai, or NRG4ai, they're inconsistent, is a token that claims to facilitate
the use of idle GPUs for AI training. According to one analytics website,
it has four holders and trades at $0.00.
The Laskys have moved on as well. Michael Lasky is now well into retirement,
but Marc Lasky is President & Director of Fernhill Corporation, "a publicly
traded Web3 Enterprise Software Infrastructure company focused on providing
cloud based APIs and solutions for digital asset trading, NFT marketplaces,
data aggregation and DeFi/Lending". Fernhill has four subsidiaries, ranging
from a cryptocurrency market platform to mining software. None appear to have
real products. Fernhill is trading on OTC Pink at $0.00045.
Joshua Sodaitis is still working on Mobicard. Mobicard 2.0 is set for a June 1
launch date, and promises to "redefine digital networking and position [PTOP]
as the premier solution in the digital business card industry." "With these
exciting developments, we anticipate a positive impact on the price of PTOP
stock." PTOP is trading on OTC Pink at $0.00015.
Michael Lasky was reportedly fond of saying that "you can get more money from
people over the telephone than using a gun." As it happens, he wielded a gun
anyway, but he had a big personality like that. One wonders what he would say
about the internet. At some point, in his golden years, he relaunched his
handicapping business Mike Warren Sports. The website sold $97/month
subscriptions for tips on the 2015 NFL and NCAA football seasons, and the
customer testimonials are glowing. One of them is from CNN's Larry King,
although it doesn't read much like a testimonial, more like an admission that
he met Lasky once.
There might still be some hope. A microcap investor, operating amusingly as
"FOMO Inc.," has been agitating to force a corporate meeting for PTOP. PTOP
apparently hasn't held one in years, is once again behind on audits, and isn't
replying to shareholder inquiries. Investors allege poor management by
Sodaitis. The demand letter, in a list of CC'd shareholders the author claims
to represent by proxy, includes familiar names: Mike and Marc Lasky. They never
fully divested themselves of their kind-of-sort-of former company.
A 1998 article in the Baltimore Sun discussed Lasky's history as a
handicapper. It quotes a former Inphomation employee, whose preacher father
once wore a "Mike Warren Sports" sweater at the mall.
"A woman came up to him and said 'Oh, I believe in him, Mike Warren.' My
father says, 'well, ma'am, everybody has to believe in something."
Lasky built his company on predicting the future, but of course, he was only
ever playing the odds. Eventually, both turned on him. His company fell to a
series of bad bets, and his scam fell to technological progress. Everyone has
to believe in something, though, and when one con man stumbles there are always
more ready to step in.
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