In an apparent mix-up at PRWeb.com, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) was said to have acquired WiFi hotspot provider ICOA Inc. for $400 million. The CFO of ICOA has now denied that the acquisition has occurred.

The original press release, available here, said that ICOA’s “suite of services and solutions power the unique requirements of high-traffic public locations such as airports, marinas, restaurants and more, while also providing back office solutions for hotspot operators and wireless service providers,” and that “Google looks to diversify it’s [sic] already impressive portfolio of companies.”

That’s all well and good, but ICOA says that the report is false. But that didn’t stop more than a billion shares of the stock — valued at about $0.0001 — from jumping 500% to $0.005 before settling back down to its opening price. This could be a pretty transparent effort by a single investor to pump and dump a penny stock. We’ll see soon enough.

Paul Ausick

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