Item # 216 - Price $49.95

$4.95 Shipping

This Colorful stock certificate is not cancelled.

Adelphia Communications incorporated in July 1986, operated in the telecommunications industry with cable television and local telephone operations. Adelphia provided telecommunications services primarily over networks that are commonly referred to as broadband networks because they can transmit large quantities of voice, video and data by way of digital or analog signals. Adelphia owned or managed cable television systems with broadband networks that passed in front of more than nine million homes and served approximately 5.7 million basic subscribers.

July 24, 2002 - The founder of cable television giant Adelphia Communications Corp. was arrested along with two of his sons, accused of looting the now-bankrupt company and using it as their "personal piggy bank."

Company founder and former chairman and CEO John Rigas, 77, was arrested Wednesday along with his sons, Timothy, a former company chief financial officer, and Michael, another former company executive.

Also arrested were James R. Brown, the former vice president of finance, and Michael C. Mulcahey, the former director of internal reporting, at their homes in Couldersport, Pa., where the company is based, said Herb Haddad, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney James B. Comey.

In addition to the criminal charges, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, calling the case "one of the most extensive financial frauds ever to take place at a public company." The SEC said the company fraudulently excluded billions of dollars in liabilities from its financial statements, falsified statistics, inflated its earnings to meet Wall Street's expectations and concealed "rampant self-dealing by the Rigas family."

June 7, 2002 - Embattled cable company Adelphia Communications Corp. late Monday said it and one of its subsidiaries had failed to make interest payments on some of their debt securities and that its former auditor is withdrawing certifications of some of its past financial statements. The double-barreled blast of bad news was the latest in a string of troubling developments for the Coudersport, Pa.-based company, which is the target of a Securities and Exchange Commission accounting probe and two federal grand jury investigations into multibillion-dollar off-balance-sheet loans to its founders.

June 9, 2002 - Adelphia Communications Corp. inflated its cable-TV subscriber base by 400,000-500,000, or 10 percent, of the firm's total customer base, a newspaper reported Friday. Additionally, investigators have turned up evidence that Adelphia kept two sets of accounting books for its capital expenditures, one of which it showed to Wall Street and boosted the amount it spent to upgrade its cable systems, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The revelations come amid bankruptcy speculation and an investigation of the nation's fifth largest cable-TV provider by the Securities and Exchange Commission over off-balance sheet transactions involving loans made to the Rigas family, which founded and controlled the company. Adelphia is also under criminal investigation by two federal grand juries, in Pennsylvania and New York.

The Telecom Disaster..!!

Documents from short-lived telecom companies are a contemporary commodity. With the introduction of the phone switching equipment, hundreds of start-up companies sold shares of their stock and millions of investors purchased these shares. But in the blink of an eye, many of these telecom companies went out of business. Importantly, most of the telecom shares were traded electronically and, thus, very few hard copy paper stock certificates were issued. Collectors of the limited number of issued certificate shares will have a rich return on their investment.

Additionally, a growing number of investors and collectors have expressed interest in obtaining the defunct shares as reminders of the roaring, heady days of the telecom bubble - and the mistakes made when it burst.

Therefore, these dot com certificates are in very limited in supply and have become a collector's dream. We invite you to experience a piece of Internet history. Its significance will most certainly continue to increase as the current generation X-ers come to realize the value of this part of history.