Opteum Strong Arm?

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Well, this is a first for me on this blog. Yesterday, a woman who I do not know and have no affiliation with, made a post on her personal blog about some of her friends who worked at Opteum and had been laid off. In her blog she linked to one of my posts that Opteum was, according to sources inside the company, for sale and that the buzz in the office was that there were at least 3 buyers interested in the company.

It turns out that some higher ups at Opteum found out about her posting and contacted her friend at the company. Her friend in turn contacted her and relayed the message that Opteum was requesting that she take the information off her blog, including a link to this blog since the information was purely speculative.

She complied and posted an update explaining why she took the link down. Apparently, that wasn’t enough as today her blog has a post "Too Much Drama for this Mama" and there is no longer any reference to her post about Opteum whatsoever.

I feel bad that she has to go through this after just making an innocuous post about some information she found out there on the internet that she thought was interesting. What a weird turn of events.

Interesting that Opteum would be trying to control the world of blogs and the information, or misinformation out there about the state of their company. It seems a bit overkill from my point of view. I mean, one or two blogs talking about employee thoughts on a company’s direction does not make or break a stock or sale or a company of that size. Whether my information is accurate or not really should not ruffle so many feathers. It is interesting that they are addressing these thoughts rather aggressively and censoring former employees.

I think that I’ve been overly clear in saying that the information that I’ve received is only from employees and that none of it has been substantiated by executives or in any other form or notice.

Then again, maybe I would be freaked out if my stock was tanking, major research analysts were questioning my ability to stay in business and whether I would have my warehouse funding pulled (a la New Century). I probably would be freaked if I was trying to unload an under-performing, over-valued loan portfolio the highest bidder before the deterioration of these securities made my losses even larger and there was some blogger talking about my company with out it coming from my PR machine. I don’t know. I’m not them, but it seems that they have bigger problems than little blog posts.