One of the most important aspects of retail investing is performing proper due diligence on the company you’re planning to invest in, whether it be the leadership team, forum posters or potentially a mixture of both. As the proverb goes, your horse can only be as good as its rider.
Over the past couple of weeks, @GeorgePell alerted to me to a poster going the handle “GoldatWidgie” which had been making meaningful, potentially even prophetic commentary on Auric Mining’s (ASX.AWJ) internal progress.
The most recent example that comes to mine was GoldatWidgie stating on the 22/05/25 that Auric’s gold ore milling will start in early 2028 despite no public information being available to confirm this.
The following day, the timeline for the rebuilding and processing of the Burbank’s mill was confirmed in Auric’s presentation regarding the recent cash raise.
Perhaps the poster got lucky about the prediction, but something didn’t sit right with me, so I start digging through his comment history. Call it a hunch, or perhaps having nothing to do on a Wednesday evening.
There were a couple of things that stood out to me:
The pseudonym of “GoldatWidgie” is shorthand for Gold at Widgiemootha which is coincidently the same place Auric’s flagship “Munda” gold mine is located.
The account was made on 23/10/23 with 76% of the 209 of comments posted on Auric’s HotCopper threads, with all the comments being overly positive with regard to company announcements. ASX.AWJ is currently down 44.18% YTD.
Another thing that stood out to me was the phrasing of the user’s comments - the commenter would frequently talk in first-person plural as if they worked at Auric and were aware of the internal discussions.
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Additionally, the poster would respond consistently with positive commentary to another poster going under the pseudonym of “Lenin” – yes, that wasn’t a spelling mistake, the famous communist Vladimir Lenin is posting on an Australian penny stock forum. It seemed odd to me, so I started investigating Lenin, and it turns out that he made his account around the same time as GoldatWidgie, has a similar writing style and primarily posts on Auric’s HotCopper threads.
Games are being played...
The game is afoot! I grabbed both Lenin’s and GoldatWidgies comment history and wrote a Python script that uses a series of libraries developed to analyse semantic and stylometric similarities. The resulting output would indicate the likelihood that the two commenters are the same person, with values between 0.8 and 1.0 representing high confidence, and values between 0.0 and 0.5 indicating low confidence.
The results of this analysis were the following:
Detailed Analysis:
• High semantic similarity - similar topics/interests (Semantic Similarity = 0.890)
• High stylometric similarity - similar writing style (Stylometric Similarity = 0.864)
• High vocabulary overlap - similar word choices (Vocabulary Overlap = 0.326)
• High TF-IDF similarity - similar content patterns (Overall Similarity = 0.824)
INTERPRETATION:
Likelihood same person: VERY HIGH (0.824)
Explanation: Multiple indicators suggest these are likely the same person.
Based on the semantic analysis of both users’ comment histories, it’s statistically likely that the comments on Lenin and GoldatWidgie are written by the same person, just on multiple accounts. This was later confirmed when GoldatWidgie started a comment with “Comrades” and spoke of “our collective” only for him to realise that he posted on the wrong account and had HotCopper moderators remove the message.
Lenin posted the same message directly after.
At this point, most of this information can be chalked up to being an overzealous shareholder with a little too much time on their hands.
The evening was getting on, and I was about to call it quits when I stumbled across a piece of evidence that turned the investigation around.
On the night of 24th of July 2024, GoldatWidgie made a fatal misstep whilst commenting on a Spartan Resources thread.
“I’m not really a punter as I’ve lived for much of my life in Asia, far away from the ASX and not involved with any resources. When I returned to Oz, I got involved in a gold mining company a year or so ago. Whilst doing investor relations research, coz that’s what I do, I happened…”. - GoldatWidgie
This confirms that the poster has recently arrived in Australia after spending most of their lives in Asia and has started working in an investor engagement role at a gold mining company in the past year.
If one were to venture over to Auric’s leadership page, you’d find that the current head of investor relations is Ross Dunkley, an award-winning journalist that worked in Southeast Asia for most of his life.
From what I can gleam from newspaper articles and ABC interviews, Mr Dunkley has had a chequered life – disillusioned with journalism and working for other people in the newsroom, he continued to edit for a rural newspaper in Australia until he struck out and decided something had to change.
Dunkley started a newspaper in Myanmar in the early 2000s with the son of one of Myanmar’s military elites (Thein Swe) with the permission of Khin Nyunt, the country’s chief spymaster. Khin Nyunt was known for prisoner brutality and would later become Prime Minister of Myanmar in 2003. Throughout his SEA epic, Dunkley has been accused of using the Myanmar Times as a mouthpiece for government propaganda, whilst also receiving international praise for pushing journalistic boundaries in a heavily censored country.
In 2011, amid debates over the paper’s future, Dunkley was imprisoned for 47 days for allegedly assaulting a woman identified by local media as a sex worker - an arrest widely viewed as politically motivated.
Ross Dunkley, co-founder of the Myanmar Times newspaper, is escorted by Myanmar policemen at the Kamaryut township court in Yangon on March 3, 2011.
In 2018, Dunkley attempted to launch another newspaper, only for his house to be raided and for him to be arrested on drug charges. He was apprehended with 797 Yaba pills (methamphetamine mixed with caffeine) and 303 grams of crystal methamphetamine, and was sentenced to 13 years behind bars.
Dunkley served 2 years and 10 months in a Burmese prison before being pardoned as part of a prisoner amnesty program and returned to Australia in 2021.
Based on Auric’s presentation and ASX announcements, I couldn’t find any records of Ross Dunkley working at Auric before 2023 with the first mention of him in the 2024 AGM meeting which proposed an Employees Securities Incentive Plan. The resolution saw Ross Dunkley receive 165,000 AWJ options as part of Tranche 1 with an 390,000 options available based on the future performance of Auric Mining.
The proposal was successful and passed with 88.3% votes in favour, resulting in Dunkley receiving the options from Tranche 1 immediately. This indicates that Mr Dunkley has a commercial interest in the financial success of the company and would need to disclose his interest if he were posting about it online.
You’re probably thinking at this point; I’ve got the wrong guy, and I thought so too. However, Auric’s biography states that he was awarded the Walkley Award, which lines up with the Sydney Morning Herald article posted here.
Okay, enough with the history lesson and investor due diligence, let’s put the remaining puzzle pieces together and recap what we know so far:
- GoldatWidgie and Lenin are likely the same person based on sematic analysis and user error, posting on multiple accounts, primarily on the ASX.AWJ HotCopper forumGoldatWidgie and by extension Lenin, recently started working at a gold mining company a year or so ago.
- GoldatWidgie has posted significant amounts of promotional information for Auric on HotCopper and is consistently supportive of the company’s decisions despite the share price being down 44.12% YTD.
- Based on the user comment’s, the person running the accounts lived in Asia for most of their lives and has recently returned to Australia. The person works in investor relations for an Australian gold mining company.
- Ross Dunkley has spent a large portion of his life in Asia working in a journalistic role, returning to Australia in 2021.
- He has recently started working as an investor relation role in Auric Mining.
- He has a material interest in the financial success of Auric and plays a significant role in investor relations with him “consistently pushing the marketing and promotion of Auric” – Mark English, Managing Director of Auric Mining.
It’s possible that Ross Dunkley is posting under two pseudonyms “GoldatWidgie” and “Lenin” on Auric Mining’s HotCopper threads, which if were the case would require him to disclose his material interest and role within the company to avoid continuous disclosure breaches and damage to market integrity. The posts have the potential to alter retail investor’s perceptions of AWJ and in turn the share price.
In the case this post gets deleted by the moderators, it's on my substack @microcapmysteries
substack.
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