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Mike Stathis has spent well over a decade running a one-man war against what he sees as a rigged financial information ecosystem – media, copywriters, newsletter mills, YouTube “gurus,” gold and crypto pitchmen, and conference circuits.

His scam-busting work on avaresearch.com / avaresearch.net is not a side project; it’s one of the core pillars of his brand.

I’ll break it down by target and by method.

1. Core thesis: the “financial media scam”

Across dozens of articles and videos, he argues that mainstream and alt-financial media are businesses first, designed to sell ads, fear-based products, and access, not to help viewers make money.

Key elements of his model:

Media as distribution arm for marketers

He repeatedly claims TV, radio, and financial portals exist to funnel audience attention to advertisers and product sponsors – not to independent research.

One article explicitly states that the financial media is detrimental to investors and “designed” that way.

Systematic promotion of chronic doomers and permabulls with lousy track records

He documents how the same small roster of “experts” – Schiff, Dent, Faber, Rogers, Rickards, Casey, etc. – are cycled through as recurring guests despite being consistently wrong on major calls.

He ties this not to merit but to marketing alignment and demographics of the owners and sponsors.

Censorship and blacklisting

He claims he’s been effectively banned or ignored by the major financial media despite his 2008 track record, while people with proven failures get prominent exposure.

He treats this as evidence that the gatekeepers promote whoever helps sell product, not whoever was right.

Ad-driven “content scam”

In multiple pieces he attacks the ad-based content model itself – arguing that if clicks, watch-time, and sponsor dollars are the incentives, you’re structurally pushed toward sensationalism, doom, and hype rather than sober research.

Methodologically, his media-fraud work leans on:

pulling old clips and forecasts,
checking what actually happened,
then juxtaposing the guest’s claims with subsequent market outcomes and their current marketing pitches.

It’s hostile and personal, but it’s not just name-calling – he usually includes actual portfolio allocations, newsletter copy, or old promos and then measures the results.

2. The gold-pumping syndicate

This is probably his most developed line of attack and runs from roughly 2009 onward.

What he means by “gold pumping syndicate”

A loose network of newsletter publishers, bullion dealers, conference organizers, YouTube channels, and “fear economists” that all reinforce the same narrative:
fiat collapse is imminent → buy physical gold, mining stocks, or specific small caps we conveniently happen to sell you or get paid to promote.
He calls it a “gold-pumping crime syndicate” and “gold-pumping con-man network” in multiple pieces, tying together Doug Casey / Agora, Schiff, Rickards, Kiyosaki, Casey’s lieutenants, penny-stock touts like E.B. Tucker, and various YouTube doomers.

Tactics he documents

From his gold-scam articles and videos:

Perma-disaster timelines:
The “crisis” is always right around the corner – hyperinflation, dollar collapse, bank holidays – but the dates keep getting pushed back, while the products keep selling. He pulls 2010–2012 forecasts about commodity super-cycles and compares them to a decade of underperformance.
Selective charts & fake ratios:
He tears into things like the Dow-gold ratio and pricing gold in multiple foreign currencies as “scams” designed to make gold look cheap regardless of reality.
Conference and copywriting loop:
Articles on the Money Show, New Orleans Investment Conference, and Agora show the same recurring names rotating between stages, newsletters, and promos. Speakers tell the same doom story, copywriters package it into 60+ minute video pitches, and affiliates/partners push it to mailing lists.
Pump-and-dump in small caps/metals:
He points to penny-stock cases (e.g., E.B. Tucker and other “gold royalty” names) where hyped recommendations in gold newsletters line up with volume spikes and later price collapses. The accusation: insiders and promoters exit into the surge created by fear marketing.
Misuse of “I told you so”:
He shows how many gold gurus retroactively cherry-pick one semi-right call amid dozens of disasters, then use that in promos for the next product – while never presenting a full track-record table.

His own counter-position

He doesn’t just say “gold is bad”; he argues:

gold and silver are speculative trading vehicles, not “investments” in the same sense as productive businesses;
long periods of dead money and drawdowns destroy real returns, especially compared to equities across the 2009–2021 bull market;
his own CCPM Forecaster and precious-metals calls navigated the big moves far better than the perma-gold crowd.

Bottom line: he’s not anti-gold per se; he’s anti-the business model that lives on scaring people into over-allocating to it and ignoring stocks.

3. Cryptocurrencies

His crypto-fraud work basically treats crypto as a 2.0 extension of the gold syndicate.

Main claims

Crypto is structurally a huge scam – not just because of particular frauds like FTX or specific tokens, but because the space is designed to facilitate:
- insider issuance,
- opaque tokenomics,
- wash trading and fake volume,
- feeding retail exit liquidity to VCs and whales.
He called out Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX-style frauds before they blew up, arguing the whole thing was an inevitable outcome of the same “tech + libertarian + easy money” cocktail that pumped dot-coms and housing.
He rips into YouTube “stock and crypto” channels like Stock Moe and others who did undisclosed promo or affiliate pushes for coins and crypto brokers, calling them “scammers and losers” and showing their thumbnails/titles as evidence of pure hype.
He goes after high-profile VCs and billionaire promoters – Chamath, others – mocking them for openly laughing about dumping on retail in venture podcasts, and saying regulators essentially looked the other way.
He dissects the SEC/Gensler actions against Binance/Coinbase and similar, arguing that enforcement is late, selective, and leaves the main structural scam (crypto as a speculative casino marketed to civilians) largely intact.

Overall, he treats crypto as a mass marketing and narrative scam first, “technology” second, with the same core pattern as gold:

fear of fiat + FOMO on “the future of money” → product sales, advisory fees, and exits for insiders.

4. Copywriting / copyediting / newsletter industry

This is where he gets unusually granular.

The “copyediting doomsday syndicate”

His series on Agora Financial and related firms lays out:

Copywriters as the real engine:
The highly paid direct-response guys – not the “guru” – craft the entire persona, narrative, and scarcity pitch. The supposed analyst just reads the script. He calls out specific copywriters and shows how the same structures are reused across different gimmicks.
Templates of fear:
He points out repeated formulae:
- “Government will seize X by date Y”
- “Banned opportunity / secret loophole”
- “Only way to protect your family”
  all tied to a newsletter or options/trading service that auto-renews at high prices.
Total disregard for track record:
Many of the “gurus” plugged by Agora-style shops either have no verifiable history or demonstrably bad one, yet the promos are stuffed with invented back-tested “1000% winners”. He repeatedly compares these inflated claims with real-world performance.
Event & conference tie-ins:
New Orleans Investment Conference, Money Show, and similar events are portrayed as physical-world funnels for the same copywriting complex. Speakers deliver red-meat doom, then attendees are pushed into paid products.

His “copywriting scam” pieces make a blunt point: in this ecosystem, the writer’s job is not to inform; it’s to manipulate emotions enough to get a credit card number.

5. Pump-and-dumps and productized scams

He applies the same fraud-spotting template beyond gold/crypto:

Penny-stock and micro-cap resource plays
He examines flashy “best stock ever” style promos (e.g., Dan Ferris / Agora pitches, E.B. Tucker mini-royalty plays) and then shows the post-pitch price charts. The pattern he highlights: spike on marketing, then long decay while insiders and early promo partners exit.
Real-estate and foreign property schemes
He connects gold pumpers and foreign real-estate schemes, especially “buy safe haven land/condos in unstable countries,” arguing both are sold to the same fear-driven audience via “fake news” about imminent US collapse.
Influencer-adjacent scams
He’s gone after life coaches and generic “success” influencers (e.g., Tom Bilyeu, others) when they act as distribution for shady financial products and pseudo-experts. The charge is simple: they sell their audience’s trust to whoever pays.
Mainstream personalities with checkered regulatory histories
Articles on Martin Weiss, Michael Pento, etc., tie their marketing narratives to SEC actions, AUM misstatements, or blown calls – and then hammer the media for continuing to feature them anyway.

6. Method: how he builds a fraud case

Whatever you think of his tone (it’s brutal, sometimes over the line), his process usually follows a pattern:

Identify a widely promoted personality or campaign – gold guru, crypto promoter, TV “expert,” copywriting pitch, conference lineup.
Collect historical forecasts and claims – clips, articles, marketing emails, screenshots, often going back several years.
Compare to outcomes – market data, realized returns, or real-world events.
Trace incentives and relationships – who advertises where, who shares guests, which newsletter house or bullion dealer is in the background.
Expose omissions – track-record sections that never mention the huge misses, regulatory run-ins not disclosed in promos, conflicts of interest, monetary relationships.
Generalize to the system – he rarely leaves it at “X is a clown”; he uses each case to argue that media + copywriting + finance are structurally aligned against the audience.

You see this clearly in his long pieces on Chris Martenson, Kiyosaki, Jim Rickards, Doug Casey/Agora, Martin Weiss, and others.

7. Strengths and limits of his scam-busting work

Strengths

Track-record-based criticism:
Unlike most online ranters, he actually brings real forecasting and portfolio results to the table, which gives his fraud accusations more weight – “here’s my track record, here’s theirs, here’s how the media chose.”
System-level view:
He’s not just calling individuals scammers; he’s mapping an ecosystem:
- media platforms,
- copywriting houses,
- conferences,
- YouTube/Podcast channels,
- bullion and crypto businesses.
  That system-level framing is rare and uncomfortable for the industry.
Documentation:
Screenshots of old promos, saved videos, and specific portfolio allocations make it harder for targets to hand-wave him away as “just jealous.”

Limits / caveats

Tone and language

He uses extremely aggressive, often ethnic/religious and personal insults in many pieces. That nukes his ability to be carried by mainstream outlets and gives his targets an easy out: they can attack his style instead of defending their record.

OUR NOTES: Any perceptions of "extremely aggressive insults" by Stathis should not be the subject of criticisms, as he is exposing a criminal mafia that continues to commit systemic fraud leading to mass suffering of millions of people.

Stathis has been banned by all media since 2006, years before he began making "ethnic" (he has gone on record many times stating this has nothing to do with religion, but rather intense ethnic tribalism which results in illegal discrimination, as well as massive fraud.

One-sided focus
His work is deliberately prosecutorial. He isn’t trying to be “balanced”; he’s trying to convict. That means you rarely see him highlight any legitimate calls or useful contributions from the people he goes after, even when those exist.

OUR NOTES: there can be no "balance" when balance does not exist. The individuals and organizations Stathis exposes never make "legitimate calls" because they are narrative-driven, ideological cults masquerading as legit research shops.

Access to full data
A lot of the worst behavior he flags is real. But for some targets, we don’t have full, audited performance data or all their historical research, so some of his conclusions remain strongly inferential rather than mathematically complete.

OUR NOTES: Stathis has earned the assumption of being correct by default due to his world-leading research track record and insights. Until you can prove anything he states to be false, you should assume it to be true because he's a top tier analyst and has no bias or agendas.

8. Where this leaves his anti-fraud project

If you step back and look at avaresearch.com / avaresearch.net plus archived content, you get a consistent picture:

He’s been hammering the same themes since at least 2009:
media as a scam, gold/doom promoters as a racket, copywriting as weaponized psychology, conferences as funnels, and now crypto as gold 2.0.
He treats exposing scams as part of his value proposition:
“We don’t take ads, we don’t pump gold/crypto/stocks, we sell only research, and we trash the people who do the opposite.”
The work is unusually blunt and naming-names, which is exactly why you don’t see it in mainstream channels. A big part of his argument is that this absence is itself proof of how captured those channels are.

So, if you’re asking whether his body of work on scams, deceit, and fraud is serious and sustained: yes. It’s one of the most systematic, if brutal, long-running attacks on the financial-media / newsletter / gold-crypto ecosystem anywhere online.

The cost is that he’s made himself radioactive to the same system he’s accusing – which, from his perspective, is probably the point.

Articles on Gold and the Gold Pumping Syndicate