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[Updates with attempt to get comment from Alibaba Group at bottom of story.]

Alibaba’s (BABA) “Singles Day” shopping frenzy that comes every year on November 11th is less than what it appears, or what the company claims, according to noted short sellers Muddy Waters Research.

The outfit this evening tweeted a shout-out to an unnamed blogger, whose writing Muddy Waters believes aptly shows just how “fake” the Singles Day claims are by Alibaba.

Entertaining and coherent dissection of how obviously fake $BABA's numbers are. Points out Singles Day claimed GMV exceeds ANNUAL rev of Sears/K-mart. https://t.co/OF6oj46izv

— MuddyWatersResearch (@muddywatersre)

As Dimitra wrote on the 13th, Alibaba reported a 39% jump in “gross merchandise sales” during the event, and sell-siders who follow Alibaba were pretty pleased with that.

The substance of the blog post cited by Muddy Waters, penned by one “Deep Throat,” is that the figure cited by management for Singles Day — and on earnings — that of “Gross Merchandise Volume” — includes transactions that “were never shipped or closed.” The author goes through a hilarious set of examples of apparent yacht sales, bundles of steel piping, and land in Estonia that the author asserts is never actually sold, merely listed in order to prop up numbers.

The author makes the point that the company’s management doesn’t seem to be able to describe how much of the GMV is “sold through their platorm(s),” as he/she/it puts it.

The author concludes "My guess is that ‘real' consumer goods GMV actually delivered is probably less than a third of what they report."

In a second tweet tonight, Muddy Waters lambasted the collusion of such sell-siders with Alibaba:

Have to also love the blatant sell side co-option on display on the $BABA call. BAML, Barclays, CS analysts in Q&A have dropped any pretense of professional skepticism by referring to company as "we", "us", "our".

— MuddyWatersResearch (@muddywatersre)

That seems to be a reference to the November 2nd earnings conference call. During that call, one analyst Xiaoguang Zhao, with Barclays, did indeed use the Royal ‘We’ several times, for example, asking,

So my first question is about our 88 Membership. Actually, we launched the membership in this quarter and we connect -- I think we connected Taobao, Tmall as well as some Alipay functions. So as we compare this to Amazon Prime membership, we think Prime membership normally have -- the members have stronger consumption intent and higher ARPU contribution. So do we have any initial financial numbers of our loyalty members to share?

Alibaba stock today closed up $2.87, or 1.6%, at $188, and has more than doubled this year.

Update: Contacted after this post was put up, Alibaba declined to comment.