The Ontario Government is paying 2.5 million dollars to a company behind a “Pump and Dump” Stock

https://ift.tt/2OWNPqZ Ontario Government provided a grant of $2,500,000 to FaceDrive for a new COVID-19 contact tracing technology. Stock for FaceDrive has risen over 2961% in the past 52 weeks. The company has a history of co-opting tech trends (Uber, meal-delivery) however has relatively small a userbase in local markets. The company has no history in health technology.How did they do this? Apparently complete fraud and stock manipulation. r/CanadianInvestor has written a great deal of due diligence on the fraud of this company and it’s CEO. A research firm called Hindenburg Research has also exposed the tactics behind this company – the research piece is from July, 2020 when the stick was up only 600%.Some highlights from the Hindenburg Research Report;​Facedrive recently went public with the core premise of being an “eco-friendly” ride hailing app that allows users to select electric or hybrid vehicle options. EV excitement has fueled the stock to a $1.4 billion market cap and an absurd 908x revenue multiple, making it the most expensive >$1 billion tech company in the world.An $8.2 Million Payment to an Opaque BVI Entity for a Month of “Marketing”, Numerous Related Party Transactions, and a CEO with a History of Destroying Shareholder ValueFacedrive’s Newly Launched Trivia App Somehow Managed to Rack Up Dozens of 5-Star Reviews Before it Even LaunchedFacedrive’s Canada-based ridesharing business appears to be dramatically impaired by COVID. While the company claims 13,000 registered drivers on the platform, we estimate current active drivers at ~500-600 total, suggesting an overstatement of ~95%.Rather than focusing on tackling just one resource-intensive highly competitive market like ridesharing, Facedrive recently entered a second—food delivery. We found Facedrive’s platform has a total of 17 restaurants compared to UberEats’ 400,000 and GrubHub’s 300,000.We called several of the “most popular” restaurants on the Facedrive Foods page. One didn’t seem to have a working phone number, and two said they don’t use Facedrive anymore.Facedrive even joined the COVID-hype train, launching a COVID contact tracing app. We reached out to their partner on the project who confirmed what appears to be overstatements of the projects’ publicly stated progress.In June 2020, Facedrive paid $8.2 million to promoters for 1 month of services. This is the largest promotion payment we have ever seen and was greater than Facedrive’s entire operating expenses over the last year.TLDR – The Ontario Government got swindled by a salesman behind a Pump and Dump stock. via /r/ontario https://ift.tt/3k7pfyZ