One of the famous small canadian mining companies that went under was named something like Bre-X, somehow a lot of members of the general public had shares of it so it was a big scandal on the news when it went under. Also as it was unraveling a whistleblower at the company "fell" from a helicopter in indonesia, I don't recall if anyone was ever charged or convicted for that.
EDIT: Oh damn it was far sketchier than I recalled and he wasn't a whistleblower. From wikipedia:
The fraud began to unravel rapidly beginning on March 19, 1997, when Bre-X geologist Michael de Guzman reportedly died of suicide by jumping from a helicopter in Indonesia.[11][12] A body was found four days later in the jungle, missing the hands and feet, "surgically removed".[13] In addition, the body was reportedly mostly eaten by animals.[14] According to journalist John McBeth, a body had gone missing from the morgue of the town from which the helicopter flew. The remains of "de Guzman" were found only 400 metres from a logging road. No one saw the body except another Filipino geologist who claimed it was de Guzman. One of the five women who considered themselves to be his wife was receiving monetary payments from somebody long after the supposed death of de Guzman.[13]
FloorEgg 9 hours ago [-]
I've raised from angels in Vancouver. There is definitely a VSE hangover culture there. During the grind I had some strange experiences.
One involved an argument with the prospective investor over the share price. In their view it had to be between 20 and 50 cents. They didn't care about the valuation, or typical investment terms, only the share price.
Another invited us to an IPO party for another company they invested in (TSX if I remember correctly). At this party we learned that the company that IPO'd had less than 100k revenue (and huge losses). They were out of business within 3 years.
I guess it is hard for old dogs to learn new tricks... They made their millions off pump and dumps in VSE days and just didn't stop playing those games even long after the exchange shut down.
bryanlarsen 9 hours ago [-]
It wasn't shut down. It's now the TSX Venture Exchange.
FloorEgg 8 hours ago [-]
That explains a lot...
Joel_Mckay 6 hours ago [-]
In general, the Vancouver culture is very different from most places, and not recommended for small firms serious about growth (even with revenue over $4m you should talk with AMCHAM to figure out an exit-to-grow strategy.) No other "Angel Investors" typically ask people to table personal assets for deals. It is actually an absurdly risk-averse place, with predatory VC terms often far worse than simple bank loans.
Vancouver has all the same problems as New York, but none of the advantages. Better options exist unless your business is rocks, logs, or crime. =3
standeven 5 hours ago [-]
Was the IPO for a hydrogen company by any chance?
FloorEgg 3 hours ago [-]
No, lol. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of stories like these.
adastra22 8 hours ago [-]
Sounds like the crypto world.
ttul 4 hours ago [-]
Some of the best crypto scam companies were born in Vancouver…
Tiktaalik 8 hours ago [-]
Even though the exchange has become the TSX Venture exchange, Vancouver remains the centre for junior mining companies, of the sort where scams are common.
I used to work in Downtown Vancouver and would on occasion get my haircut at a downtown barber frequented by office workers all around, and those barbers were a wealth of knowledge about the latest gossip from shifty junior miners and whatever they were into, which was increasingly not mining, but trendy startups.
Funny thing was when I was working in the area mining was going through a bit of a downturn, so a lot of the junior miners were shifting into other hot things they could fundraise for, like cannabis and crypto. From scam to scam to scam.
I stopped working downtown so stopped getting the gossip but I presume they swiftly pivoted to NFTs and onto whatever flakey thing they could still dubiously attach a .ai domain to.
ClimaxGravely 7 hours ago [-]
I just happened to be going through every stock in the TSX from smallest market cap to largest. Many of the stocks at the bottom were mining companies that started with some huge spike then faded into nothing for the next N years until the current state of what seems to be basically dead.
btown 7 hours ago [-]
I assume you’re referring to crypto mining, but the mental image of handlebar-mustachioed ore miners gossiping in Vancouver barber shops about how to scam investors with their shaft-digging operations is quite hilarious to think about! Pickaxes must be left at the door after the Incident.
dghlsakjg 7 hours ago [-]
He’s actually talking about guys banging on rocks looking for gold. So to speak.
My dad is involved in junior mining projects (geology, not gpu), and, yep, Vancouver is where you go to find these sorts of things, legitimate or not.
Tiktaalik 6 hours ago [-]
Oh no absolutely real mining.
But ultimately the transferable skills are pitch making, selling to investors, pumping and dumping.
That applies not just to some plot of land in some obscure place that has some "enormously promising" signs of valuable minerals, but also some new crytocurrency, NFTs, cannabis, VR and all sorts novel things. AI is the latest thing but it won't be the last.
When mining is hot they'll focus on mining, but when it's not they'll be looking to see how they can use their skills on other places.
(Not to say that any of these things are necessarily scams per se, I personally think there's lots of interesting things going on with AI, but this is the ocean that these guys swim in, and there'll be lots of money attaching some flimsy nothing idea to the latest hot trend)
teunispeters 6 hours ago [-]
that's pretty accurate ;) I used to live in Vancouver too and ... some of that culture's like that. Most is good 'ol "people in suits" though.
A long time ago, Vancouver was a center of gold mining scamming too. "Gassy Jack" downtown was one of the major scammers near the founding of the city.
xmprt 7 hours ago [-]
My first thought was ore mining before crypto mining. I think I've recovered from the days of crypto induced mania where every other article on Hackernews was cryptocurrency related.
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
Energy (oil & gas) and Resources (mining) have some serious scams, minor coup d'états, and no shortage of the not so funny.
Common low level scams such as falsifying assay results from ground and bore hole samples are just the beginning.
More questionable scams tap dance about questions of who really owns or controls resources, who can be paid off, and how to bury money spent greasing wheels by various means.
It's worth mentioning that the 'culture' you describe is also something that significantly aided and abetted various real estate scams and bubble related activity. Vancouver has all sort of shady shit going on in real estate.
andy99 10 hours ago [-]
This is new to me, it probably was a scam, but the part about
Investors lose 84% of their money some of the time and all of it 40% of the time
is meaningless. This could easily be true for many venture investments, which is how this exchange is presented. High risk investment is not the same as a scam.
xmprt 7 hours ago [-]
There is a real difference though. Individual investments might lose all their money but as an aggregate VCs make money by investing in dozens or hundreds of companies. No VC is losing all their money across all their investments but that's what this article is claiming happened to investors on VSE.
ylee 9 hours ago [-]
When I started at Goldman Sachs, I was told early on of an "Israeli discount" and "Canadian discount"; that is, investors were more skeptical of companies based in those countries.
I was not told of any more details than that at the time, but I now wonder if the VSE contributed to this?
adastra22 8 hours ago [-]
In the latter case, yes. Israel is because reasonable geopolitical doubts.
charles_f 5 hours ago [-]
> the nost respected fiction authors in Canada are Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies, but no-one churns out a body of fiction as consistently high a quality as the companies listed at the VSE
That line got me chuckling.
FiatLuxDave 9 hours ago [-]
My Dad lost my college fund in the 1980s investing in the gold mining penny-stocks on the VSE. Fun times.
morkalork 8 hours ago [-]
My dad lost my sibling's college fund in the dotcom bust! Some things never change..
kristianp 9 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of small mining exploration companies in Australia's ASX. Most only exist to pay for the directors' lifestyles.
decimalenough 7 hours ago [-]
How does that work? Is there anything you can point me to where I can read more about this?
I, naively, would have assumed that publicly listing your company would be anathema if you're up to sketchy shenanigans.
Isn’t there this whole weird economy of empty pink sheet companies that just act as lifestyle funding for people?
Animats 8 hours ago [-]
1989. The good old days, before blue-sky scams went mainstream.
missedthecue 9 hours ago [-]
Low listing standards means all the frauds and trash will congregate there. The AIM market in the UK has a similar reputation.
grod423 7 hours ago [-]
To some extent, you see a similar dynamic happening on the ASX (Australian Stock Exchange) to this day. Plenty of mining companies that purchase the rights to explore for resources in some African territory with questionable governance concerns that serve as shells for directors to cash in fees. Lots of biotechs with similar track records there too.
The saying still holds, a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it.
lutusp 8 hours ago [-]
On the topic of low-quality investments, there should be a posting rule that HN submissions consist of text, not pictures of text, so readers can search for additional information by copying text, not images.
Nothing is more frustrating than an image-based PDF masquerading as text, especially now that, with little time or effort, OCR can convert most images into text documents.
thomassmith65 8 hours ago [-]
It's not my site but I'm the one who posted it here. The nice thing about a scan (if it's good quality) for an old article like this is it viscerally provides some context (eg: the era and type of publication). The scan quality here is abysmal, and for that I do apologize.
gostsamo 7 hours ago [-]
as someone blind, there is one more reason to consider image based pdf-s undesirable. OCR works okayish most of the time, but it tends to suck when it does not and if the layout of the scanned page is complex, the output often breaks down. Not to mention that the friction of converting it is a disincentive to bother.
yieldcrv 8 hours ago [-]
Vancouver still functions at least as sketchy plumbing for the US financial system
I don't think there is any regulator quirk or shielding from doing it up there, people up there just do it
cperciva 7 hours ago [-]
regulator quirk
There is, sort of, but it's a constitutional quirk. Securities regulation is, for weird historical reasons, a matter of provincial jurisdiction; past Federal governments have said "hey look this is stupid let's just merge the regulators so we can do one good job instead of 10 bad jobs" but politics got in the way.
If the US SEC were replaced by 50 per-state SECs, you'd probably see Alaska or Wyoming becoming the scam capitals because they lack the resources to properly regulate.
gucci-on-fleek 5 hours ago [-]
> If the US SEC were replaced by 50 per-state SECs, you'd probably see Alaska or Wyoming becoming the scam capitals because they lack the resources to properly regulate.
Sure, but BC is 10× the population of Wyoming, so that's not really the best comparison. Plus, Delaware is tiny, yet their business regulations are fairly strong.
yieldcrv 4 hours ago [-]
I was referring to the US SEC and DOJ, they will easily establish jurisdiction against anyone touching US markets in some way, anywhere in the world
Including Vancouver
(The US has state level securities regulators too, but they are redundant, weak and almost defunct, but they still exist in every state.)
There is no obvious benefit to being sketchy in BC aside from many things are legal in the US, it’s just a matter of convincing investors to invest
I guess there’s just a sketchy network up there
numpy-thagoras 1 hours ago [-]
Sketchy and Vancouver go hand-in-hand.
I live and work here. I play it straight and do my best.
However, the culture here pushes for a lot of sketchy things, often to make up for lack of productivity or some other deficiency.
cindyllm 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 10:33:16 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
EDIT: Oh damn it was far sketchier than I recalled and he wasn't a whistleblower. From wikipedia:
The fraud began to unravel rapidly beginning on March 19, 1997, when Bre-X geologist Michael de Guzman reportedly died of suicide by jumping from a helicopter in Indonesia.[11][12] A body was found four days later in the jungle, missing the hands and feet, "surgically removed".[13] In addition, the body was reportedly mostly eaten by animals.[14] According to journalist John McBeth, a body had gone missing from the morgue of the town from which the helicopter flew. The remains of "de Guzman" were found only 400 metres from a logging road. No one saw the body except another Filipino geologist who claimed it was de Guzman. One of the five women who considered themselves to be his wife was receiving monetary payments from somebody long after the supposed death of de Guzman.[13]
One involved an argument with the prospective investor over the share price. In their view it had to be between 20 and 50 cents. They didn't care about the valuation, or typical investment terms, only the share price.
Another invited us to an IPO party for another company they invested in (TSX if I remember correctly). At this party we learned that the company that IPO'd had less than 100k revenue (and huge losses). They were out of business within 3 years.
I guess it is hard for old dogs to learn new tricks... They made their millions off pump and dumps in VSE days and just didn't stop playing those games even long after the exchange shut down.
Vancouver has all the same problems as New York, but none of the advantages. Better options exist unless your business is rocks, logs, or crime. =3
I used to work in Downtown Vancouver and would on occasion get my haircut at a downtown barber frequented by office workers all around, and those barbers were a wealth of knowledge about the latest gossip from shifty junior miners and whatever they were into, which was increasingly not mining, but trendy startups.
Funny thing was when I was working in the area mining was going through a bit of a downturn, so a lot of the junior miners were shifting into other hot things they could fundraise for, like cannabis and crypto. From scam to scam to scam.
I stopped working downtown so stopped getting the gossip but I presume they swiftly pivoted to NFTs and onto whatever flakey thing they could still dubiously attach a .ai domain to.
My dad is involved in junior mining projects (geology, not gpu), and, yep, Vancouver is where you go to find these sorts of things, legitimate or not.
But ultimately the transferable skills are pitch making, selling to investors, pumping and dumping.
That applies not just to some plot of land in some obscure place that has some "enormously promising" signs of valuable minerals, but also some new crytocurrency, NFTs, cannabis, VR and all sorts novel things. AI is the latest thing but it won't be the last.
When mining is hot they'll focus on mining, but when it's not they'll be looking to see how they can use their skills on other places.
(Not to say that any of these things are necessarily scams per se, I personally think there's lots of interesting things going on with AI, but this is the ocean that these guys swim in, and there'll be lots of money attaching some flimsy nothing idea to the latest hot trend)
A long time ago, Vancouver was a center of gold mining scamming too. "Gassy Jack" downtown was one of the major scammers near the founding of the city.
Common low level scams such as falsifying assay results from ground and bore hole samples are just the beginning.
More questionable scams tap dance about questions of who really owns or controls resources, who can be paid off, and how to bury money spent greasing wheels by various means.
In mining, you'll often see events such as:
* https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/australi...
* https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/18/resol...
Multiple sides to both these events.
I was not told of any more details than that at the time, but I now wonder if the VSE contributed to this?
That line got me chuckling.
I, naively, would have assumed that publicly listing your company would be anathema if you're up to sketchy shenanigans.
The saying still holds, a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it.
Nothing is more frustrating than an image-based PDF masquerading as text, especially now that, with little time or effort, OCR can convert most images into text documents.
I don't think there is any regulator quirk or shielding from doing it up there, people up there just do it
There is, sort of, but it's a constitutional quirk. Securities regulation is, for weird historical reasons, a matter of provincial jurisdiction; past Federal governments have said "hey look this is stupid let's just merge the regulators so we can do one good job instead of 10 bad jobs" but politics got in the way.
If the US SEC were replaced by 50 per-state SECs, you'd probably see Alaska or Wyoming becoming the scam capitals because they lack the resources to properly regulate.
Sure, but BC is 10× the population of Wyoming, so that's not really the best comparison. Plus, Delaware is tiny, yet their business regulations are fairly strong.
Including Vancouver
(The US has state level securities regulators too, but they are redundant, weak and almost defunct, but they still exist in every state.)
There is no obvious benefit to being sketchy in BC aside from many things are legal in the US, it’s just a matter of convincing investors to invest
I guess there’s just a sketchy network up there
I live and work here. I play it straight and do my best.
However, the culture here pushes for a lot of sketchy things, often to make up for lack of productivity or some other deficiency.