What am I, chopped liver? WGCH’s Metter sues Teri Buhl, but not me!

"Oh, we'd NEVER cheat YOU, big boy!"

Michael Metter, evil genius behind the Sponge Bob penny stock scam, is offended at Buhl, the NY Post and various other writers for exposing his fraud and has sued, but left me out of the fun. Gee, I thought I was pretty plain how I felt about this purported business enterprise, again and again and yet again, without result, but I’m willing to try one more time. By the way, the complaint is about the worst drafted piece of crap I’ve ever seen, so perhaps Metter’s lawyers will want to bring a separate action against me for calling them incompetent hacks who should never have been admitted to law school, let alone granted admission to the bar. I knew that on-line law schools were a bad idea.

UPDATE: Matchbook lawyer’s hiring explained: Turns out, SpongeTech’s passing rubber checks to people like the NY Islanders, and getting sued therefor. You can’t pay your bills, I guess you’re stuck with hiring your useless nephew as a lawyer.

Did WGCH’s Michael Metter get Teri Buhl fired?

Bill Clark writes that Ms. Buhl may have been fired from Greenwich Time for reporting on the stock scam WGCH owner Michael Metter is running. I don’t know – it seems to me that GT’s Dave McCucumber is a frightened rabbit, scared of his own shadow, and would a dump a reporter at the first sign that someone was “Angy” at McCucumber, but certainly Teri gave Metter something to be angry about. He’s running a penny stock fraud for something called SpongeTech and people running scams just hate when you point that out.

WGCH and Sponge Bob’s Metter

More on phoney sales order rumors. Standard operating procedure for penny stocks is the false claim of huge new orders, which never materialize, from the likes of CVS and Walmart. So this sounds familiar.

One more shot at Greenwich’s Sponge Bob Kid and then I’ll quit

Until further developments anyway. Here’s Roddy Boyd’s Slate piece from September 2009 that set this off. Its 5 pages, all worth reading, but I especially love this part:

If someone really is buying all of these sponges abroad—despite a marketing effort that is 100 percent focused on the American consumer—the company is stretching out their payment cycle way past the standard 30-day, or even 90-day, cycle. Spongetech is not General Dynamics (GD) or Intel (INTC), so it can’t access overnight funding markets when its customers’ checks are caught in the mail.

I called and e-mailed the company and its public relations firms—Lippert Heilshorn, which resigned from the account late last week, and the Dilenschneider Group—and heard back only from Dilenschneider’s Andrew Osterland. Via e-mail, he said Spongetech’s lawyers retained his firm only to help with one press release and to address the concerns raised in the New York Post stories. An e-mail was also sent to Steven Moskowitz, the company’s CFO, but no substantive reply has been received.

So, since I live near Spongetech CEO Michael Metter, I stopped by his lovely Greenwich, Conn. house on Saturday afternoon for an impromptu chat. A gruff, bald fiftysomething man came to the door and insisted that Michael Metter was not home. When I showed him a picture of Michael Metter I had printed from the Internet and pointed out that he looked almost identical, he became irritated. He refused to answer questions about the SEC investigation, the Post articles, or Michael Metter’s background as the head of a penny-stock boiler room, insisting that “Metter is not going to do any interviews.”

Greenwich Time’s new pit bull strikes again

Teri Buhl’s certainly earning her keep at our once moribund local. Today she’s out with a story of WGCH’s owner Michael Metter’s other profession: selling soapy sponges and watered stock. The SEC’s after him and, poring over the various Internet hits on his company, here, here and here, just for instance,this has all the earmarks of the penny stock pump and dump schemes I used to pursue. It’s possible the poor guy’s the victim of nefarious outsiders seeking to profit at his expense. It’s also possible that Frankie Fudrucker will conduct his next political campaign dressed in a full burka. I’m betting I’ll witness Frankie’s comely form draped and hidden from sight before SpongeTech clears its name.

Besides, Metter ruined a dinky radio station that, while irrelevant, did once have its uses, like announcing snow days for the schools. Did you know that WGCH doesn’t have an Arbitron rating now because the audience surveyors could find no one who admitted listening to the station? I’m not sure if any of you are spending money on ads on WGCH but you could do just as much good by sending me the cash – I’ll take better care of it, I promise.

Michael Metter, president and part-owner of Greenwich radio station WGCH, is facing a federal securities investigation and multiple lawsuits against another business concern, his penny-stock company SpongeTech.

Metter, who lives on Tinker Lane in the backcountry [ Note to T. Buhl: Tinker is south of the Merritt, which puts it in mid, not back country - ed.], co-founded SpongeTech Delivery Systems Inc. in 1999. The company makes a sponge filled with soap, which is intended to eliminate the need for a bucket of soapy water to be used during a car wash. The company has been a prominent advertiser at Yankee Stadium and other sports venues, including Madison Square Garden, and co-branded with the cartoon character Sponge Bob in a marketing effort.

In October 2009, trading in the company was halted for 10 days by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which announced that it had “temporarily suspended trading in the securities of SpongeTech because of questions that have been raised about the accuracy and adequacy” of the company’s financial disclosures.

Then, in December, the SEC issued a notice to the company that its staff “intends to recommend that the Commission bring civil injunctive actions” alleging violations of federal securities laws.

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