An Anaheim company that claimed to have developed a product that can detect the Ebola virus in hours instead of days was ordered to stop trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday.
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Wholehealth Products Inc. issued a news release on Nov. 3 about its PCR Rapid Ebola Test, but SEC officials say they imposed the suspension now due to a lack of publicly available information about the company.
“We move quickly to protect investors when we see thinly traded stocks being promoted with questionable information that make them ripe for pump-and-dump schemes,” explained Elisha Frank, co-chair of the commission's Microcap Fraud Task Force, to City News Service. “Fraudsters are constantly exploiting issues of public concern to tout a penny stock companies supposedly in the business of addressing the latest crisis.”
The SEC on Thursday also shut down trading in Ebola-related companies Immunotech Laboratories Inc. of Monrovia, Bravo Enterprises Ltd. of Patchogue, New York, and Myriad Interactive Media Inc. of Toronto.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.