Ever since stories of stock option wealth became fairly common, it opened up a tremendous new arena for scammers of all types to convince people they could "get in early" on certain stock deals. In some cases, these were run by out-and-out con men, such as people who pretended to work for VC firms, promising to get investors' money into hot private startups, or the guy who used "sophisticated Wall Street lingo" to convince people he could sell investors shares in Google stock prior to the company's IPO. However, at other times, it's really just naive entrepreneurs who don't realize you can't just sell parts of your company without jumping through a few legal hoops. It's not clear which camp the latest case falls into, but the operators of an adult website based in Colorado clearly were breaking securities law in offering to sell shares in the yet unincorporated company via ads in the local newspaper. Apparently, the ads were convincing enough that at least one person took the company up on its offer.