Carmen Electra gained fame as a Playboy centerfold and scantily-clad star of Baywatch, but her latest business ventures may not be so innocent. Take a look at a few examples of her involvement with shady penny stock promotions:

• Back in June of 2006, MarketWatch's Chuck Jaffe wrote up a company Electra was involved with as his Stupid Investment of the Week. Jaffe received a phone call featuring the prerecorded voice of Carmen Electra, touting a company called Luvoo.com (OTC PK: LUVT). Shares of that company have since collapsed to 8 cents per share.

• Electra also signed on as a spokesman for a company called eFoodSafety.com (OTC BB: EFSF), and the company put out a press release hyping her involvement.

• The most interesting one: Payment Data Systems Inc. (OTC BB: PYDS) is a tiny microcap that announced its Carmen Electara prepaid Mastercard last year. Here's where it gets potentially shady. The company paid penny stock shill Jonathan Lebed $25,000 for a one-month investor relations contract that mainly consisted of sending out emails to his subscribers touting the stock with messages like "Combined with PYDS's new Carmen Electra debit cards and many more celebrities coming soon, it doesn't get much bigger than this!!!"

• For those of you who don't remember, Lebed made headlines in 2000 when he settled SEC charges of stock manipulation -- at the age of 15. Ever the self-promoter, Mr. Lebed posted a YouTube video of himself rubbing elbows with Ms. Electra.
  

I don't know the extent of Ms. Electra's involvement with these companies/stock promotions. But the fact is she has gotten herself involved with some pretty shady characters, and it's something her handlers may want to keep an eye on: Associating with the targets of SEC investigations can be a career-killer.

I was wondering what that odd caller id was: www.luvoo.com. Chuck Jaffe from MarketWatch picked up the phone when the call rang into his residence. And it was Carmen Electra (her pre-recorded voice, but still).

She was pitching online dating, but Jaffe thought it notable that she'd mentioned www.luvoo.com's stock was publicly traded. He followed the trail to the web site, where, he says, the "current focus seems to be on its stock; the most prominent feature is a bad head shot of Electra over the words 'Newly Publicly Traded!'"

It seems pretty obvious that Carmen's main goal was not to get Jaffe and myself (both happily married, just for the record) to find each other via the terribly-designed site, but for us to find a quick money-making scheme.

Jaffe goes in-depth and highlights Luvoo.com (LVTI, currently down 12.5 cents on the day to 27.5 cents) as a "stupid investment of the week." Warning flags include daily press releases since the June 9 IPO (most frighteningly, with the CEO talking about how honored he is to have been featured on sites like IPOMovers, "paid marketing conduits"); the lack of any discussion of a business model, or balance sheet; and the fact that the numbers trumpeted in press releases are rather amorphous and without any basis -- for instance, the fact that Carmen's endorsement caused a 400% jump in subscriptions (400% of what? and are any of those monetizable?). There was no press release announcing how the Pauly Shore endorsement affected the company's prospects (licking the bottom of the celebrity endorsement salsa bowl, guys?).

It's a good reminder that stocks shouldn't be evaluated on the basis of the company's celebrity pitch-people, but by the quality of their financial statements. And having a sexy voice on the other end of the phone is likely as much of a red flag as a disappearing business model.