The Data Room

The Echo Chamber

This is the second installment of our popular Discord Gods story, the first of which you can read here.

Rob Parker

March 24, 2025 

A key component in Canadian oil company ReconAfrica’s messaging machine about their Namibian oil and gas exploration operation has been their Encore ReconAfrica channel on the communications app Discord. 

An August 2022 email titled “Discord Sentiment” was apparently sent by Grayson Anderson, ReconAfrica’s Vice President, Investor Relations to Encore moderators and chosen investors. The mail raises serious legal questions about whether the company influenced the information mix appearing on the channel. SEC rule 10-b says that it is unlawful for “any person’’ to “make any untrue statement about a material fact” in connection with the “purchase or sale of any security.” 

ReconAfrica is a junior oil and gas company that came to Namibia in 2020 making improbable claims like ‘’Is This The World’s Greatest Oil Play?’’ where founder Craig Steinke boasted in December 2020 that “the entire country could be transformed” and suggested ReconAfrica would lift people in the Kavango regions out of “generational poverty”. 

There were definitely reasons to be skeptical. 

The emperor has a working clothing system. 

ReconAfrica seemed to prove the skeptics wrong, when an April 2021 press release stated that they found ‘’clear evidence of a working petroleum system” from the company’s first well, which was drilled near the remote village of Kawe in Namibia’s Kavango Region.

The Canadian company’s press release contained a statement from Tom Alweendo, Namibian energy minister, who hailed these results as “great news for the people of Namibia”.

It would have been something akin to a miracle for ReconAfrica to find oil on their first well. ReconAfrica hired global energy consultants Sproule to evaluate their Namibian prospect in 2018. Even though Sproule’s report, updated in 2020, was based on ReconAfrica’s (generous) assumptions, it still assigned a meagre 3.3 percent chance of finding recoverable oil and gas. 

ReconAfrica had another problem. Sproule’s report explicitly stated that Recon was targeting unconventional resource extraction, i.e fracking, which they had no license for. 

The problem for ReconAfrica is that just days after the company’s own paid content in September 2020, advertised board member Nick Steinsberger as the ‘’father of fracking”, Namibia’s Ministry of Mines and Energy put out a press release that explicitly said no fracking would ever be permitted.

ReconAfrica changed the fracking narrative to keep the play alive. They did so without gathering any new data, leading geologists in the audience at a February 2021 public consultation in Windhoek to suggest that the company was simply making it all up as they went along. In September 2020, ReconAfrica deleted all references to fracking from their website and failed to disclose this material change to investors or regulators.

All of this meant the company’s chances of a commercial find they could legally extract, according to their own commissioned report, was close to zero. Adding to these steep odds, the company was drilling blind, having not even done any seismic testing prior to drilling.

Nonetheless, ReconAfrica used the Sproule report as a key pillar in their multi-million dollar marketing campaign even after the company changed its fracking narrative.

Despite these pertinent facts, the share price rose dramatically based on the press release about the Kawe well to over 10 USD dollars. 

ReconAfrica share price 2020 to present day. Toronto Stock Exchange https://money.tmx.com/en/quote/RECO 

In a clear signal he was not here to ‘transform Namibia’, founder Craig Steinke unloaded the majority of his shares during the huge 2021 stock price increase, netting him tens of millions of US dollars out of the Kavango license. 

On October 26, 2021, during a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Natural Resources hearing Tjekero Tweya, the former trade minister, questioned whether Namibia received any benefit from ReconAfrica’s stock manipulation. “From six cents to $11, there is no oil, but the value has gone up,” he said, adding that  ‘’Namibia is getting zero”. 

By May 2021, the company had achieved a market capitalization of 2 billion Canadian dollars. But without having found any actual oil, the good times couldn’t last forever.

When short sellers Viceroy Research released a devastating report on June 24, 2021, titled: “No oil? Pump Stock” and the company finally released data from the first well,on August 5, 2021, the market correction sent the share price into a free fall, from which it would never fully recover. 

Superpump

On September 01, 2022, Namibian Energy minister Tom Alweendo called ReconAfrica a “supermajor” on Twitter. 

On the very same day, September 01, 2022, at an event hosted by The Namibian Chamber of Mines, ReconAfrica’s General Manager Robert Mwanachilega told the panel and audience ‘’We’ve made discoveries of oil and gas in the Kavango Basin, we’ve got oil, oil which flow there.”

These statements were unusual, not just for their timing, but in that neither had much foundation to support it. ReconAfrica had no basis to claim ‘’oil which flows’’. Recon Africa’s status as supermajor was likewise extremely premature, but was nonetheless celebrated in Encore ReconAfrica with a slew of fire emojis. 

The statements may have contributed to price increases and heavy trading volume on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The stock closed over 30 percent higher that day despite no public disclosures having been made by the company.  

The sudden jump in the share price, unsupported by any material disclosures by the company appears to have put ReconAfrica in a difficult, but not unfamiliar, position.   

ReconAfrica put out a press release the next day, September 2, 2022 but it contained no information which accounted for the surge in volume and price. Mwanachalinga was never censured by the company for making these statements but was promoted to Vice President in 2024.

Chambers which Echo 

An email sent by Grayson Anderson, ReconAfrica’s VP Investor Relations may shed light on how the company influenced the culture of the Discord channel. The mail has its own separate discussion forum on Encore called #the-email-that-was-sent. In that forum the always chatty Encore moderator DavidJ confirms receiving the mail and admits it was from Grayson. 

Anderson, a ReconAfrica executive, berates the moderators for permitting negative comments in the channel. They appear familiar with each other and Anderson says that this was not the first warning: “This is something that I have noted to a few of you for a year or more”, as one would admonish a long-time employee. 

He continues: “Frank Steffen has a negative article nearly every day in the German Namibian newspapers in Namibia but why the people of discord make it so easy and give people working AGAINST YOUR INVESTMENT AND YOUR MONEY, ideas, ammunition and data to help reduce the value of your investment” (Caps in original).

Anderson implores moderators to think of ReconAfrica’s share price as a member of the family: “Do you not tell your wife and children you love them everyday. Or do you wake up and call them ugly, fat, dumb and say they piss you off every day?”

Anderson then throws caution to the wind: “Many of you suspect the Discord is full of or mostly includes people who more actively post are working against the company, why do you let it happen? People respond with “We don’t want it to become an echo chamber” Why not?”

The channel, always cloistered, became a boiler room. Investors say that new measures such as having to verify your phone number before being able to comment, were subsequently introduced. 

Investors interviewed for this story have stated that they don’t want to be named as they fear retribution. Some investors detail intimidation attempts, including aggressive messages and users who managed to obtain their IP addresses.  

Geology 101

The discourse inside EncoreReconAfrica has been so thoroughly disconnected from reality by ReconAfrica’s tendency to obscure negative material results with misleading language that it has led confused investors there to ask: Why does this stock always fall on good news?

There is an Encore forum where such newbies can find help to understand their investment called #geo-chat.  

Users identifying as geologists, many of whom have since disappeared, are highly respected within the channel. Many of them talked absolute rubbish and misled those looking to them for guidance but no word of caution from moderators could be found about taking advice from Discord geologists. 

Encore’s self-identified geologists, such as Thorjac, have been instrumental in pushing back against factual information.

On September 01, 2022, when Recon executive Mwanachilega made statements about ‘’oil which flow’’, Thorjac was dishing out expert advice such as “Oil is migrating like a son of a gun” to great acclaim.

A geologist who has been following ReconAfrica closely said he was “banished from the Geoscience special group” on Encore after he pointed out that “Thorjac was playing silly buggers with all the seismic and colouring in massive reservoir zones everywhere all filled with oil.”

Harvard’s Paul Hoffman, one of the planet’s most respected geologists, told Rolling Stone that any Kavango hydrocarbons had cooked away hundreds of millions of years ago, adding that this was “Geology 101”. 

Canadian academic and geologist Elisabeth Kosters studied the literature and came to the same conclusion independently. She says “these rocks were ‘cooked’ to the extent that any hydrocarbons evaporated out of them a long time ago.” 

When Matt Totten junior, a former BP geologist living in Windhoek, made his presentation to the Namibian Scientific Society debunking ReconAfrica’s claims, none of Encore’s local geo-shareholders made a real-world appearance to defend the company.

In Encore ReconAfrica however, these accomplished professionals were no match for geo-shareholders such as “Thorjac”, “Pancakes” and “Hathi”. 

A user with the handle name “Special K” testified in 2021 that he read an analysis that questioned ReconAfrica’s story, but unfortunately for him, he checked with the Encore geos to see if it was true.  

The emperor has significant indications of clothes. 

“Recon 2.0’’ is led by new CEO is Brian Reinsborough, who was hired in August 2023 to be the face of a rebrand, but the company’s actions on the ground suggest not much has changed.  

Reinsborough gave an ‘’interview’’ in August 2024 to stock promoters Proactive, which like their earlier promotions, was disguised to appear as journalism about the Naingopo, their fifth well: “Its a game changer for us. Game changer for the country as well. You know, its a big oil prospect”.

Yet, when a January 2025 press release announced that the Naingopo well had found a “working petroleum system”, somehow it just didn’t land the same. Tom Alweendo did not hail this dry hole as great news. In fact, he doesn’t mention ReconAfrica much at all anymore. The press release said Recon found ‘’significant indications of oil’’ but everyone knew it was just wordplay. 

Almost everyone. In the Discord, comments struck a familiar note. A poster named “Giltedge”, one day after the company’s newest dry hole was announced, expressed his confusion about the market reaction.

It’s easy to see how people got caught up in the mania of the Encore discord chat, but even through the haze of moonshot emojis and Lambo memes under “Thorjac’s” latest eye-watering analysis, many must have harboured a feeling that something wasn’t right. 

In “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), Matthew McConaughey’s character, Mark Hanna, describes a fugazi “:  “It’s all a fugazi – you know what a fugazi is?” and continues, “Fugazi, fugazi, it’s a whazy, it’s a woozy. It’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist”.

Anderson admits in his infamous email that ReconAfrica’s value is based on fairy dust. He says: “Each negative post impacts the sentiment about the equity and the value of your investment,” but this is only really true if there is no other basis for monetary worth.

If there were really 120 billion barrels of oil in the Kavango, negative comments on Discord could not take it away.