The Emulex hoax was an instance of securities fraud perpetrated by 23-year-old Mark Jakob on August 24, 2000.[1]
Jakob, a former employee of the press release distribution service Internet Wire, was facing a loss of almost $100,000 as a result of short-selling stock in the Emulex Corporation, a fiber-optic equipment manufacturer.[2] To cover his losses, Jakob wrote a fake release stating that Emulex's CEO had quit and the company was restating its quarterly earnings from a profit to a loss.[3] Jakob then sent it to Internet Wire, posing as an Emulex publicist.[4]
The next morning, the phony release was picked up by Bloomberg Television and other news outlets. Emulex's stock price on the NASDAQ stock exchange dropped from $103.94 to $43.00 in only 16 minutes of morning trading, losing $2.2 billion in market capitalization.
The press release was a fraudulent short and distort stock manipulation. Bloomberg picked up Jakob's fake release at around 10:13 a.m., just as Emulex, headquartered in California, was opening its doors for the day, and the stock price fell 62% before Emulex found the fake release and asked the National Association of Securities Dealers to halt trading, which it did at 10:29 a.m.[5] Once the release had been conclusively debunked, trading resumed on Emulex and the share price recovered almost immediately to close at $105.75.
The FBI traced the release to Mark Jakob, who had realized a profit of more than $240,000 by shorting the stock. Jakob pled guilty and was sentenced to 44 months in prison, forfeiting the gains and owing an additional $103,000 in penalties. Jakob's fraud cost Emulex shareholders almost $110 million.