The Data Room

Did ReconAfrica promoters reference an “astrology” website operated by a recidivist stock offender in order to increase the company’s share value?

Rob Parker

Thursday, February 13, 2025

A convicted stock promotion charlatan was deeply involved in what appears to be a well orchestrated pump and dump scheme to increase the stock value of oil and gas wildcatter ReconAfrica in 2021. This successful operation allowed early investors, and potentially company insiders, to profit generously off of a huge increase in the stock value of the company over the course of just a few months in 2021.

ReconAfrica is a Canadian company exploring for oil and gas in the Kavango East region of Namibia and began drilling their first well in December 2020. By April of 2021 they had completed this first well and started on their second, announcing that month that they had discovered what they called a “working petroleum system”. This announcement sent the stock price soaring. The problem? -four years later the company still has not discovered any oil or gas at all.  

The roots of ReconAfrica can be traced back to a  press release appearing on September 05, 2019, which announced that Reconnaissance Energy Africa (ReconAfrica), formerly known as Lund Enterprises Corporation, completed a reverse takeover and “is pleased to announce that the Company’s common shares will resume trading on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol “RECO” at market open on September 6, 2019.” The company’s first two wells were drilled without doing seismic surveying, in contravention of most established oil exploration principles.

The company has drilled three more exploration wells since then but still,has no recoverable oil and gas to date. Critics have asserted that ReconAfrica, and its promoters, artificially inflated the company’s share price by making claims about this “working petroleum system” found in their exploration area, in what was an apparently successful effort to profit from the increase in the stock price of the company at the time.

Namibia’s New Era Newspaper reported in late 2021 that multiple ReconAfrica insiders benefited from this 2021 bump in the company’s stock price by selling their shares in the market at possibly inflated values.

Without commercial hydrocarbons, the soaring share price was unsustainable, and the company heavily promoted a narrative about short sellers, which may have kept many investors from engaging with the facts presented by numerous journalists and analysts. 

Thomas Ronk is a former stockbroker with an extensive history of fraud who was paid to promote ReconAfrica during their stock heydey of April/May 2021. His website Buyins.net was referenced by ReconAfrica’s stock promoter and shareholder oilprice.com as an independent analyst.  

According to research done by independent website Sharesleuth, The US Securities and Exchange Commission previously investigated Ronk for  involvement in stock fraud related to the activities of his business partners in 2010.  Although he was never charged at that  time, a prosecutor representing the Justice Department at the hearing said the government believed that Ronk “was involved in the conspiracy’’.

But this is not when he was apprehended. Investors who lost money on some of Ronk’s claims would have to wait nearly ten years for any kind of justice.

A whistleblower challenges ReconAfrica narrative

A May 2021 National Geographic article reported that a whistleblower filed a report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claiming that ReconAfrica misled investors about the company’s prospects of finding oil. 

The article noted that ‘’the company’s value increased from $191 million at the start of the year to more than a billion dollars in mid-May. The complaint, which relied on public records, cited what it says are more than 150 instances of misleading statements by ReconAfrica, and alleges that the company raised millions of dollars by fraudulent means. and claims that several top executives sold their shares while ReconAfrica promoted the stock.“ 

A National Geographic editor at the time named Rachael Bale tweeted that ReconAfrica immediately filed over twenty new reports with Canadian and US regulators after the reporters for National Geographic submitted questions, as you can see below. 

Reddit and other stock discussion platforms were filled with misinformation that may have undercut the factual reporting on May 21. Samples of those posts can be seen below, but note that National Geographic was never sued by anyone for their reporting.

Two days after the magazine’s story came out on May 24 2021, ReconAfrica put out a press release associating National Geographic’s reporting with misinformation from ‘’short sellers’’. The response lamented that “‘a storied publication like National Geographic” could be facilitating “activist short sellers attempting to attack ReconAfrica’s stock price.” 

A short seller is an investor who borrows shares of a stock and sells them on the open market, expecting to buy them back at a lower price later. The goal is to profit from a decline in the stock’s price. When the price drops, the seller buys back the shares and returns them to the lender, pocketing the difference as profit.

ReconAfrica’s response to National Geographic’s May 21, 2021 story went on to say that this all occurred immediately after short positions in ReconAfrica’s stock increased significantly, more than tripling in volume.  The company explicitly stated that “National Geographic has enabled these short sellers to potentially line their pockets”

Ronk Rolled?

These claims were further amplified by articles appearing on ReconAfrica promoter oilprice.com like one titled Is There A Huge Undisclosed Short In Oil Explorer Reconnaissance Energy Africa? by one “Charlie Danes”. These appeared on the oilprice.com website on May 27, 2021  Oilprice.com has publicly stated that it is a shareholder in ReconAfrica. From that website the story was shared all over the internet, becoming a dominant narrative for many online investors.

Notably, this was not the only promotional material the website ran by what appears to be the fictitious ‘Charlie Danes’. A promotional article appeared a week before May 12 with a similar title ‘Is There A Huge Naked Short on Helium Explorer Avanti Energy?’ The ‘author’ of the oilprice.com, again ‘Charlie Danes’ does not appear to exist outside of these two articles. In both articles Thomas Ronk is quoted.  Ronk, the former broker, claims his website can identify stocks poised for big increases because of developments that are likely to trigger so-called “short squeezes’’.

In the article Charlie Danes said ‘’We called Tom Ronk of Buyins.net after the report came out to dig deeper into the numbers. He told us this could be one of the larger short positions (as a % of total volume) he has come across in his experience recently.’’  

Along with other analysts, the author believes that ‘Charlie Danes’ is most likely a pseudonym for oilprice.com editor James Stafford.  Prior to the ReconAfrica story, Ronk was again quoted by “Charlie Danes”, on May 12, 2021 about Avanti Helium. Interestingly, Google search results for ‘’Is There a Huge Naked Short On Helium Explorer?” show the original title, but current searches show the previously published article about Avanti Energy has disappeared completely from oilprice.com. The link has been replaced by an article about Biden and the solar industry, as you can see below.

Althoughs oilprice.com removed this article attributed to Charlie Danes from their website, the name Charlie Danes lives on in numerous places where the article has been reproduced since then. 

Both articles by Charlie Danes that claim companies are under attack by short sellers name a sole source of information, namely Thomas Ronk’s Buyins.net report. It is notable, as you can see below, that the website Buyins.net is barely functional with few links performing.

A June 2nd 2021 article in Energy Voice stated that ‘’ReconAfrica pays Buyins.net for data and advertising’’ in spite of the fact Thomas Ronk’s buyins.net website, which purported to have detected a ‘’massive short position’’ in ReconAfrica, was clearly not up to the task and had been described by a complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2007 as ‘’astrology software’’. 

The oilprice.com article by the fictitious Charlie Danes claimed the short position on the ReconAfrica stock was so malicious that it threatened the reputation and integrity of Canadian capital markets. This remarkable claim relied solely on buyins.net.  When our team tried to sign up for a ‘’Free Report” at buyins.net we only got the blank email you can see below.

In 2020, the SEC formally charged Ronk in connection with unregistered offerings of securities in two microcap companies accused of being ‘’pump and dump’’ schemes, Casablanca Mining Ltd. and Gepco Ltd.

According to the SEC’s complaint filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Ronk touted the issuers’ illusory business prospects and made revenue projections without any basis in fact. The complaint, posted on the blog Securities Lawyer 101, noted with concern that “unless Ronk is permanently restrained and enjoined, he will again engage in the acts, practices and courses of business set forth in this Complaint and in acts, practices and courses of business of similar type and object.’’ 

The complaint has more than a passing resemblance to his support of ReconAfrica in 2021. Many analysts and the whistleblower noted in the National Geographic Article of May 2021 alleged at the time that company insiders were most likely aware that what the company called “a working petroleum system” was probably not true.

The judgement against Ronk was settled in May 2023 in the US Court for the Central District of California. On their website the SEC noted that “Ronk was involved in three separate fraudulent schemes.”  The regulators went on to note that “the Defendant engaged in a number of practices aimed at misleading the market to increase and maintain artificially high prices so that he and others could sell off their holdings for substantial gains.”