Barry W@bhwizzy
$RITE - For those that use IHUB as your research, its time for the 21st Century. If you read IHUB about $RITE, you read scam company, no Skull Valley lease and tailings are worth nothing and even libel claims. I took all of the IHUB garbage and told ChatGPT give an honest analysis and DD on Skull Valley. Bottom line, you use IHUB for DD at your own risk and losses. THE IHUBBERS WERE PROVEN TO BE LIARS AND PEEPLES WON ALL THEIR CASES. Ask yourself, AZ knows the value of the mines and would not have done a 20 year lease with $RITE if it was worthless. WHY????? AZ gets a royalty of the revenues, so why spend time and money drafting a lease if the tailings are worthless? Its because they are not, another IHUB lie. “Skull Valley area” can mean two related but distinct things:
The broader Skull Valley/Copper Basin mining area in Yavapai County, Arizona, whose documented history goes back to 19th-century placer and copper activity; and the specific 377.11-acre Peeples/Skull Valley state lease east of Skull Valley that later became tied to Hexagon/NMC/MineralRite filings and disputes.
A. Synopsis: Skull Valley mining district, court cases, and SEC actions
The broader mining history around Skull Valley is mainly tied to the Copper Basin district east of Skull Valley. Local historical material says Copper Basin produced copper, molybdenum, and gold, with production beginning in 1911 and ending in 1961. It also notes placer gold workings north of Copper Basin Wash that began in the 1880s, were reactivated around 1929, and were active again in the early 1930s.
The more controversial modern chapter centers on the Peeples/Skull Valley lease on Arizona State Trust land. MineralRite’s 2025 Form 10/A describes that property as about 377.11 acres in Yavapai County, about 3 miles east of Skull Valley via Copper Basin Road, with prior mining from roughly 1984 to 1995 and fine black sands/tailings left for possible later processing. That filing also says the lease had previously been in default and was being reinstated, and that no mineral resources or reserves were declared and no technical report summary had yet been filed at that time.
On the state administrative/court side, an Arizona Geological Survey report on mining scams says the Arizona State Land Department issued a Notice of Default and Denial of Plan of Operation on October 20, 2000, based on its inability to find precious metals on the lease and Hexagon’s alleged noncompliance with earlier orders. The report says a 2001 administrative law judge recommended denial because the tailings were treated as waste/common variety mineral and found the assay reports from Donald Jordan and Dnyanendra Shah to be “highly suspicious and unreliable.”
There is, however, an important conflict in the record. NMC’s 2005 OTC disclosure says that in State of Arizona v. Peeples, Inc., Peeples won seven of eight issues before the ALJ, lost one issue in Superior Court, then won on appeal, after which it was “successful on all issues” and even recovered attorneys’ fees and costs from the State. I would treat that statement cautiously unless you want me to chase down the actual state-court docket and opinion.
On the SEC side, the key federal action is much clearer. In 2003, the SEC brought a civil fraud case against Michael J. Pietrzak, Maurice W. Furlong, and Donald E. Jordan tied to Hexagon/Health Care Centers of America. The SEC alleged that Hexagon recorded the Skull Valley ore/tailings asset at $200 million even though it had not established ownership or fair value, and alleged that the company never actually owned the ore because Arizona retained ownership under the lease. The SEC also alleged that Donald Jordan issued reports valuing the Arizona material in the billions of dollars despite lacking a reasonable basis and without demonstrating economic recoverability.
Separately, NMC’s own 2005 disclosure says the SEC also instituted an administrative matter against Hexagon Consolidated Companies of America, Inc. over failure to file required reports, and that the company agreed to an order revoking registration. The same disclosure says Pietrzak was informed in October 2003 that he was a target of a federal grand-jury investigation involving possible securities-law and tax violations.
In the current chapter, MineralRite’s January and March 2026 SEC/press disclosures show the company now has a successor Arizona State Land Department common variety mineral materials lease for the same approximate 377.11 acres, running from May 2, 2023 to May 1, 2043. Those same 2026 disclosures explicitly say the project is still in preliminary review, that the Qualified Person’s work is only validating the continued presence of tailings and reviewing historical data, and that the work does not establish mineral resources or reserves. MineralRite also disclosed that it responded to SEC staff comments on its Form 10 registration statement.
B. Thorough narrative of the full Skull Valley area history
The story of the Skull Valley area begins with the broader settlement and mineral exploration of west-central Arizona, but the mining story is mostly an east-of-town story, centered on Copper Basin and nearby placer ground. In the documented local and district history, placer deposits north of Copper Basin Wash were worked starting in the 1880s, then saw renewed activity around 1929 and in the early 1930s. Copper Basin itself developed as a more formal mining area, with production beginning in 1911 and continuing until 1961, centered on copper with associated molybdenum and gold. In other words, the historic district was real, but it was never one of Arizona’s giant Tier-1 camps; it was a modest district with intermittent production and a lot of leftover workings, debris, and hazards.
The modern Skull Valley controversy is not really about the old Copper Basin district as a whole. It is about a specific state-trust-land lease area east of Skull Valley, later associated with Peeples Mining/Peeples, Inc. MineralRite’s modern filing places that site on about 377.11 acres accessed by Copper Basin Road and says the area was worked from about 1984 to 1995, with black sands or tailings left behind for possible future processing. That distinction matters, because later promotional claims often blurred the line between a real historic mining area and a much narrower claim about the recoverable value of previously processed material sitting on one leased tract.
That tract entered the securities-promotion world in the 1990s through Health Care Centers of America, later renamed Hexagon Consolidated Companies of America. According to the SEC’s 2003 complaint, Hexagon issued stock in 1995 to acquire a company whose main asset was a sublease connected to 500,000 tons of ore inventory in Skull Valley. The SEC alleged that Hexagon then booked that Arizona asset at $200 million, despite not having established either true ownership or objective fair value, and despite the lease itself requiring state approval for assignment or operations. The SEC’s theory was not merely that management was optimistic; it was that the accounting and public disclosure were materially false.
The SEC complaint goes further and is central to understanding why Skull Valley became controversial. The Commission alleged that the material in question was really tailings from a prior mining operation, and that Arizona as lessor retained ownership of the ore while Hexagon only had lease-derived rights to extract whatever minerals might exist. It also alleged that Donald Jordan, an assayer, issued reports valuing the Arizona material at around $4 billion and later described the site as containing more than $3 billion in commercial quantities of precious metals, even though an assayer is not the same thing as a qualified mining engineer or economist and even though there was no established economical extraction method. In the SEC’s telling, these reports helped support misleading SEC filings and inflated market perceptions of the company’s assets.
At roughly the same time, Arizona regulators were challenging the project from a land-and-mining-law angle. The Arizona Geological Survey’s “Arizona Mining Scams and Unassayable Ore Projects” report says the Arizona State Land Department issued a Notice of Default and Denial of Plan of Operation in October 2000. The reported basis was that the department could not verify precious metals on the lease and that Hexagon had failed to comply with prior ASLD orders. After a 2001 hearing, the administrative law judge reportedly recommended denial on the ground that the tailings were waste/common variety material rather than a special economically recoverable mineral resource, and described the supporting assay reports as unreliable. That framing is important because it attacks the project at the root: not just “your plan is incomplete,” but “the material itself may not support the kind of mining claim you are making.”
But the legal history is messy, and that messiness is part of the Skull Valley story. NMC’s later OTC disclosure gives a much more favorable version for the company, saying State of Arizona v. Peeples, Inc. ultimately ended with Peeples prevailing on all issues after an appeal and recovering fees from the State. Without the underlying Arizona court opinion in hand, the safest interpretation is that there was a genuine multi-stage dispute involving an adverse administrative recommendation and later company-claimed appellate success. So the record is not a neat one-line ending; it is a contested history with different tellings from regulators, company disclosures, and critics.
The SEC chapter is less ambiguous. In March 2003, the SEC brought its complaint against Pietrzak, Furlong, and Jordan, alleging securities fraud tied in part to the Skull Valley asset valuations. NMC’s own 2005 OTC disclosure also says the SEC pursued an administrative action against Hexagon for failure to make required filings, resulting in revocation of the registration, and that Pietrzak later became a federal grand-jury target. Whatever one thinks of the geology, the securities-law takeaway is straightforward: federal regulators believed the Skull Valley asset had been used in a way that materially distorted public-company disclosure.
After that, the property never really disappeared; it just kept changing corporate wrappers. The old Hexagon/Peeples/NMC lineage eventually fed into the present-day MineralRite story. In its 2025 Form 10/A, MineralRite described the Skull Valley property as a leased state-trust-land asset with prior mining history but no declared mineral resources or reserves and no technical report summary on file. That is a very different posture from the billion-dollar valuation rhetoric of the 1990s: it is much more constrained, at least on paper, and fits modern SEC S-K 1300 standards.
Then, in January 2026, MineralRite announced execution of a new ASLD common variety mineral materials lease for roughly the same 377.11 acres, with a term running May 2, 2023 through May 1, 2043. The company described the lease as a successor to the earlier lease. In March 2026, MineralRite further disclosed that a Qualified Person was only in Phase 1 review: verifying that previously processed tailings are still present and reviewing historical technical material. Crucially, the company said this preliminary work does not establish, update, or opine on mineral resources or reserves. It also disclosed that it had responded to SEC staff comments on its Form 10.
