SAN FRANCISCO, April 22, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hagens Berman updates investors in the following publicly-traded companies and urges investors who have suffered significant losses to contact the firm. Further details about the cases, including upcoming application deadlines, can be found at the links provided.
EHTH Investors Click Here.
IQ Investors Click Here.
SERV Investors Click Here.
ZM Investors Click Here.
eHealth (EHTH) Securities Class Action:
Class Period: Mar. 19, 2018 – Apr. 7, 2020
Lead Plaintiff Deadline: June 8, 2020
Sign Up: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/EHTH
Contact An Attorney Now: EHTH@hbsslaw.com
844-916-0895
The complaint alleges that Defendants misrepresented and concealed eHealth’s highly aggressive accounting and modeling assumptions, skyrocketing rate of member churn resulting from the company’s pursuit of low quality, loss-making growth, and its reliance on direct response television advertising which attracts an unprofitable high-churn enrollee.
Investors began to learn the truth, according to the complaint, on Apr. 8, 2020, when Muddy Waters Capital published a scathing report about the company, finding that eHealth uses deceptive accounting to mask a significantly unprofitable business. According to Muddy Waters, eHealth makes “overly optimistic” modeling assumptions concerning its health insurance plan life-time values (LTV), obscures customer churn rates, and materially understates costs. As a result, Muddy Waters claims eHealth has grossly overstated its reported revenues and operating profit by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Moreover, Muddy Waters pointed out that while falsely hyping the company as “the Expedia / Zillow of health insurance,” corporate insiders have sold $35 million of their personally held stock at inflated prices, including CEO Scott Flanders, who sold 15% of his stake in January 2020 alone.
On this news, the stock plummeted $12.82 or approximately 12% in a single trading day.
iQIYI (IQ) Securities Class Action:
Class Period: Mar. 29, 2018 – Apr. 7, 2020
Lead Plaintiff Deadline: June 15, 2020
Sign Up: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/IQ
Contact An Attorney Now: IQ@hbsslaw.com
844-916-0895
The complaint alleges that Defendants misrepresented and concealed material facts about iQIYI’s business and financial performance. Specifically, the complaint alleges that Defendants inflated iQIYI’s revenue figures, user numbers and operational expenses to cover up other fraud.
Investors began to learn the truth, according to the complaint, on Apr. 7, 2020, when Wolfpack Research published a scathing report, “iQIYI: The Netflix of China? Good Luckin.” According to Wolfpack, the company was committing fraud well before its 2018 IPO and has continued to do so ever since. Wolfpack estimates that (a) iQIYI inflated its 2019 revenue by 27% - 44%, (b) overstates its user numbers by 42% - 60%, and then (c) inflates its expenses, the prices it pays for content, and other assets and acquisitions in order to burn off fake cash to hide the fraud from its auditors and investors.
In addition, according to Wolfpack “[a]rguably one of the most egregious examples of accounting fraud IQ commits is the inflation of barter revenue” whereby barter sublicensing revenues are determined by internal estimates of the value of traded content, allowing management to unilaterally assign inflated values to the transactions.
This news drove the price of iQIYI ADSs sharply lower during intraday trading on Apr. 7, 2020.
ServiceMaster (SERV) Securities Class Action:
Class Period: Feb. 26, 2019 – Nov. 4, 2019
Lead Plaintiff Deadline: June 9, 2020
Sign Up: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/SERV
Contact An Attorney Now: SERV@hbsslaw.com
844-916-0895
The complaint concerns Defendants’ concealment of the financial risks presented to ServiceMaster’s Terminix business arising from Formosan: an invasive termite impacting the Gulf Coast region, particularly Mobile, Alabama.
The complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants represented that ServiceMaster was successfully executing upon initiatives to improve the performance in the Terminix segment. In addition, Defendants stated that Terminix would reach a positive “inflection point” and was “definitely the driver” for positive trends in the second half of 2019. Unbeknownst to investors, however, in the past several years the Terminix segment had experienced an adverse trend of costly termite litigation, primarily related to Formosan activity.
Investors began to learn the truth, according to the complaint, when the company announced disappointing preliminary Q3 2019 financial results on Oct. 22, 2019. Defendants blamed the poor performance on “termite damage claims arising primarily from Formosan termite activity” primarily in Mobile, Alabama. Defendants also announced (1) this was a known issue and the company commenced mitigation efforts “starting in 2018,” and (2) the President of Terminix Residential suddenly departed.
Then, on Nov. 5, 2019, ServiceMaster released its final Q3 2019 financial results, informing investors that (1) the increase in termite claims litigation that occurred “[i]n the past few years” impacted termite revenue by 7-8%, (2) these issues would continue throughout 2020, and (3) price increases in Mobile were part of an effort to “mitigate” termite damage claims.
These disclosures have driven the price of ServiceMaster shares sharply lower.
Zoom Video Communications (ZM) Securities Class Action:
Class Period: Apr. 18, 2019 – Apr. 6, 2020
Lead Plaintiff Deadline: June 8, 2020
Sign Up: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/ZM
Contact An Attorney Now: ZM@hbsslaw.com
844-916-0895
The complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants misrepresented and concealed that: (1) Zoom’s data privacy and securities measures were inadequate; (2) the company’s video communications service was not end-to-end encrypted; and, (3) as a result, users of Zoom’s services were at an increased risk of having their personal information accessed by unauthorized parties, including Facebook.
According to the complaint, investors began to learn the truth through a series of partial disclosures occurring between Mar. 30, 2020 and Apr. 6, 2020, when media outlets published reports about the company’s deficient security measures and privacy settings.
Most recently, on Apr. 20, 2020, The New York Times reported Zoom’s security woes were no secret to business partners like Dropbox. According to the report, over a year ago hackers sponsored by Dropbox uncovered a major security vulnerability in Zoom’s software that could have allowed attackers to covertly control certain users’ Mac computers. The New York Times reported that “[a]fter Dropbox presented the hackers’ findings [...] to Zoom […] it took more than three months for Zoom to fix the bug.”
Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding EHTH, IQ, SERV, and/or ZM should consider their options to help in the investigation or take advantage of the SEC Whistleblower program. Under the new program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Reed Kathrein at 844-916-0895 or email EHTH@hbsslaw.com, IQ@hbsslaw.com, SERV@hbsslaw.com, and/or ZM@hbsslaw.com.
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Contact:
Reed Kathrein, 844-916-0895