Lordstown motors lordstown motor sportstown motors, i'm talking about lordstown motors in 2020, lordstown motus was a company that offered a glimpse into america's all-electric future. The company was assembled seemingly out of nowhere and quickly rose to fame it caught the eyes of the us government and once traded on the stock market at a valuation as high as 5.3 billion dollars. Yet behind all this was allegedly one of the largest stock market frauds in u.s history. It was a fraud so large that it rivals other fraudulent promises, such as theronos nikola motors and enron, despite lord's town's deception, that it will soon cover the company still trades.

On the stock market today, under the ticker symbol of r-i-d-e in this video, i will cover how an eevee startup defrauded the entire united states and walked away with millions of dollars in cash. Welcome to cas gaines academy, if you're new to the channel, please consider subscribing for more content like this and let's get right into it. On november 22nd 2016, a company named workhorse group revealed this plan to create a battery electric pickup truck called the workhorse w15 pickup truck. The truck was seen as the ultimate disrupter of the pickup truck industry and showed the world the future of pickup trucks for 50 thousand dollars.

People would be able to purchase a pickup truck capable of 80 miles of battery electric range and 230 miles of gas-powered range to a range extender in 2016, the truck took wall street by storm and the company's valuation took off to a nine-figure value. Yet behind this was some extremely suspicious activity. The workhorse w15 was designed to come to production in 2018, but then got delayed to 2019 and again to 2020. Until finally, the truck was gone too many people, the products seemed very promising until it simply disappeared.

We're here in long beach, california, as guests of the workhorse group, why? Because they're showing us the first drivable, fully electric pickup truck yet the workhorse w15 pickup truck wasn't completely gone after some minor changes and a simple rebranding of the vehicle was completed. One of the largest frauds in history was born. The ceo and co-founder of workhorse group steve burns had a sketchy leadership style from the start. According to hindenburg research, one senior employee claimed they saw more questionable and unethical business practices from steve than they had seen over their entire career.

As the ceo of workhorse steve earned millions of dollars into the workhorse w15 pickup truck with no success at all. He made outrageous claims about production, which is seen in the following interview in 2018., some of the fleets that pre-ordered are going to get it latter part of this year, they're going to get some early units to make sure we haven't missed anything and it covers their Needs and so initial production will start late this year, but the the bulk of them will be. In 19., in february of 2019, steve was pushed out of workhorse or wasting money and missing deadlines. Four months later, steve started his own company lordstown motors and purchased the intellectual property for the workhorse w15 pickup truck.

What we now know is that steve didn't actually want workhorses intellectual property, which only included some designs and a couple of eevee patents. The property that steve actually wanted was the pre-orders for the workhorse w15, which is the book of 6000 pre-orders steve reclassified. These orders as quote-unquote sales and use them to help raise money in november of 2019 lordstown got a deal with a purchase in old general motors playing with the 40 million dollar loan. This purchase brought lordstown fame on a local state and federal level.

The unveiling of the lordstown endurance was attended by high profile guests, including president trump, and vice president mike pence. What the guests didn't know at that time was that lord 10 will become a large-scale fraud, while on the stage lordstown took a bold move to drive its prototype on the stage with mike pence. Six months later, this pickup truck would explode into pieces. On august 3rd 2020 lawrence town announced that it would go public on the stock market via sbac under the ticker symbol of r-i-d-e.

In order to create investor confidence in the company, lower town allegedly created fake pre-orders and claimed those pre-orders as sales, each pre-order does not require any deposit and in some cases, lordstown actually paid other companies to pre-order. To give you a sense of what kind of companies are pre-ordering lordstown trucks. Take a look at one company that pre-ordered 14 000 trucks named e-squared energy advisors. The company only has two employees on linkedin was filed as an individual business and has an office that is actually just a mid-tier apartment building.

Yet somehow the company was able to pre-order 14 000 pickup trucks or 735 million dollars worth of trucks. When hindenburg research reached out to the company, they responded by saying they don't operate a fleet and pre-ordered the trucks for a quote-unquote brand new program. Another company that pre-ordered 1000 trucks was a two-person startup and they had a virtual office listed as their address plenty of lordstown's. Pre-Orders are just like these examples.

These vaporware pre-loaders were clearly created to boost evaluation of lordstown motors, in one case, steve burns paid 30 for each pre-order that a company ordered according to former employees at lordstown. These companies pre-ordered the truck as a favor to the ceo steve burns. Despite this steve burns, touted the pre-orders as if they were legit and going to go through, we have our whole year. Our first year of production, already pre-sold, we got 27 000 orders.

We got customers really really wanting to truck. Well, we sell to commercial fleets, that's our first customer and, like you said, we've already got 50 000 pre-orders and it seems as if uh some of these orders. The 50 000 are from solid, a duke energy of first energy. These people are not going to be walking away; they are committed right, yeah, all of them.

You know when you order, i think our average water size is about 500 trucks at a time bringing in 500 electric vehicles into your fleets, not trivial, so you got to plant all the charging and everything so very serious orders and we have pre-sold uh. A hundred thousand of these two two various fleets across america, steve burns, essentially went on all sorts of platforms to tell everyone that their pre-orders were quote-unquote serious when most of them were actually just fake pre-orders. Most recently steve went on cnbc to claim that he has always been saying that the futures were not serious. Are those truly serious orders? Well, no, we've been phil, we always been very clear right.

These are. These are just what they're intended to be right. These are non-binding letter. Intents they're called pre-orders out in the in the kind of real world, so always classify them.

For that, and - and we have a lot of those pre-orders, there's very serious orders - we have pre-sold already pre-sold. Do you regret the way you characterize those reservations? Well, reservation, i'm phil! All i can you know i don't want to get into specific. All i can tell you is demand, is robust. We've never said we had orders, we don't have a product, yet by definition, we can't have orders right so when you're early and you're years away from a product in this case one year and now we're down to six months.

So now that we have the betas, we are starting to be able to short some of that up, but uh. I don't think anybody thought that we had actual orders right. We just that's just not the nature of this business. Steve is clearly contradicting himself here, but there are even more serious problems going on with lorton's truck and accompanies claims about his future.

When lordstown was first created by steve burns in november of 2019, he stated that lordstown would start delivering vehicles by the fourth quarter of 2020.. Yet in april 2020, lorssan said that deliveries would begin. In january 2021., two months later, lordstown delayed this delivery date to early 2021 and, most recently in january 2021, the company delayed the delivery date to september 2021, and this will most likely be delayed again in the future. A former lordstown employee has stated that lordstown's pickup truck may go into production in three to four years.

If it even goes into production in the first place. First of all, to start with, the company's product is practically non-existent. In january 2021, the company decided to test out his pickup truck prototype. This would be the first road test for the lordstown endurance, pickup truck in just 10 minutes in the test.

The truck suddenly started lighting on fire. The entire inner portion of the vehicle was absolutely destroyed by the fire. Nevertheless, two weeks after the fire lordstown announced that it would be building beta trucks, which was clearly a ridiculous statement. I actually called lordstown out four months ago before the company went public and told all of you to watch out for the company in november of 2019.

Lordstown claims that the automaker would beat tesla to the market as the first electric pickup truck. However, on that day, they had no prototype to show that's right, no prototype at all lordshan made a single prototype and is acting like they can suddenly scale to mass production in less than one year. This all seems like a huge investor grab to me. I'm not a financial advisor and you should always do your own due diligence, but i do have to say that personally, this is a stock that i'm very cautious about.

This could allegedly very well be trevor milton and nicola motors all over again back then. I received plenty of backlash, but now it's quite obvious that loroten could be a fraud, yet lordstown's ethics goes beyond ambitious timelines. While lordstown was looking for an infotainment system for its pickup truck steve burns went into negotiations with a company named karma automotive to license out karma's infotainment system. Instead of licensing karma's infotainment system, lord son stole it according to a lawsuit filed by karma lord son, secretly hired employees of karma and encouraged employees to steal thousands of karma's proprietary documents via usb flash drive.

After that, those employees used these documents to build lordstown's infotainment system. The reason why these employees got caught is quite hilarious. After lordstown canceled its deal with karma and stole all of karma's proprietary documents, one employee accidentally sent an email to karma, showing how much money lordstown would save by stealing karma's infotainment system in the email was a statement saying that lordstown would save 4.6 million dollars by Stealing karma's trade secrets and also confidential information. In addition to this, the lordstown ceos also deceived investors.

By lying about lord sun's battery technology in december of 2019, steve announced that lortel is building its own battery pack inside the plant, good uh. Of course, if you're an electric vehicle, your battery is your number one thing: that's why we're building our own battery plant here we don't make the cells, but we assemble these 6 000 small cells into a pack of our own design, and it sits in the floor Of the vehicle, so it's a critical part and you got to control the cost of it. A lot of people associate. You know there is the raw elements.

The lithium, like you, talked about in the cells, but how you hold those 6000 cells and and thermally, manage them and electrically manage them and get them to last a long time. That's kind of the secret sauce of an oem electric oem anyway, and we we all do we do that all in in-house here, contrary to steve's claims, a former employee stated that there is no battery pack manufacturing equipment on site there. Now they just put it together by hand. The contrast between steve's claims and the former employees is quite drastic.

It's either you're building batteries with machines in-house or you're. Not. We now know that lordstown may have allegedly been involved in several criminal activities. Nevertheless, lordstown's insiders are about to walk away with 28 million dollars in stock and could walk away with much more in the future.

Lordstown recently went public in october 2020, but nonetheless, lordstown's insiders have already been selling plenty of shares. This includes 28 million dollars with a stock sold by lortan's president vp of propulsion and vp of engineering. All of this stock is being unloaded when the company hasn't sold or even created a working product. That's right before the company has even sold a product.

Its insiders have already sold millions of dollars with a stock that right there is a clear sign that something is going wrong, and this is very similar to a company that i called out multiple times in the past. In fact, during the time when lordstown's prototype went on fire, lord tan's executive sold 8.8 million dollars with a stock overall lower town's. Eventual downfall should be a clear warning to be always suspicious of any company that claims to have revolutionary technology without even having a product. In the first place, let me know what you think about lordstown motors.

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