If you have ever heard the words “this is not financial advice” or “this is not stock advice” when scrolling through TikTok or YouTube, you can be sure the next several minutes will be devoted to doing exactly that. Now federal law enforcement alleged that several financial influencers followed by hundreds of thousands of would-be traders were using their fans to bet big on stock trades, all the while expecting to cash out before prices tanked. In an unsealed 44-page indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, a grand jury charged eight financial influencers in a large-scale securities fraud conspiracy that racked up over $114 million over a little less than two years. The U.S. Department of Justice alleged these influencers went by handles like “PJ Matlock” AKA Perry Matlock, “DipDeity” AKA Daniel Knight, and “LadeBackk” AKA Stefan Hrvatin. Federal law enforcement said all of these accounts hyped up certain companies by posting false info to their thousands of followers on Discord and Twitter and through podcast appearances, all while planning to dump their shares when the stock price became inflated. Between them, the alleged fraudsters had hundreds of thousands of followers who were potentially listening to their stock advice while soaking up many inane “dude bro” messages the influencers regularly posted to their accounts. The eight influencers named in the indictment include: The DOJ said Knight was party to the scheme through his podcast Pennies: Going in Raw that he hosted alongside Mitchell Hennessey, while the other alleged fraudsters were active in coordinating their stock promotions. Along with multiple counts of securities fraud and conspiracy, the influencers could be on the hook for $114 million, according to the indictment. Attorney information for the influencers was not immediately available Wednesday. Matlock was arrested Tuesday at his home in The Woodlands, Texas, according to court filings, and he has since pleaded “not guilty.” At the same time the DOJ revealed its indictment, the Securities and Exchange Commission also revealed charges against the eight individuals. The scheme is a classic example of a “pump and dump,” where fraudsters artificially inflate the value of a stock price in order to cash out later. In this case, the financial influencers were reportedly profiting by hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time from them bumping up the price of some stocks. “The defendants used social media to amass a large following of novice investors and then took advantage of their followers by repeatedly feeding them a steady diet of misinformation, which resulted in fraudulent profits of approximately $100 million,” SEC enforcement chief Joseph Sansone said in a release. As if to accentuate the allegations, the indictment dives into transcripts of recordings from some of the influencers as they chatted openly about their scheme on Discord. The SEC noted that the influencers thought their conversations were private, but all the while they were being recorded. When Knight and Tom Cooperman chatted about their scheme in May 2021 to pump up the value of GTT Communications’ stock price, one of their co-conspirators, who went unnamed in the indictment, seemed afraid of getting caught. The person said “I just wanna do it the right way…” Knight allegedly responded: “The f*cking right way? We’re robbing f*cking idiots of their money.” The conspirators spelled it out pretty cleanly in their Discord chats just what they were trying to accomplish. “Like, what [RYBARCZYK] does is he alerts it, and then, like, five minutes later all his little minions start, like, retweeting it, and saying ‘added with him,’ so it, like, builds the hype back up. It happens every single time. They have this sh*t down to a f*cking science. It’s great.” According to the SEC, Rybarcyzk, who went by “The Stock Sniper” on Twitter, told his followers “It’s not my goal to only make me prosper. I want all of you to prosper. I’m gonna make each and every one of you make it. The market is so universal. You just adapt to current conditions. Let’s go crazy.” While Matlock’s account was disabled by Wednesday, Rybarczyk, Deel, Hrvatin, Cooperman, and Hennessey were all still tweeting about stock prices Sunday going into Monday. By the time they stopped messaging, the influencers were promoting companies like investment managers State Street Global Advisors, immunotherapy company Harpoon Therapeutics, and the retail giant Amazon. Knight’s account last tweeted Dec. 10 “Thinking about becoming an antivaxxer but was already vaxxed. Are there any devout antivaxxers that can help me please.” Edward Constantinescu’s last tweet from early Wednesday morning read: “I love my homies on here. The rest of you can keep swinging on my nuts.” https://gizmodo.com/the-stock-sniper-twitter-discord-stock-market-1849893498
Unpopular opinion, but I don't think this should be illegal and I feel like it's a waste of time/resources prosecuting this. If they owned a traded company or something I'd feel different, but these are just fellow gamblers in the capitalism casino. Buyer beware.
Manipulate to the point of "it's science", which then isn't gambling. Others are harmed for their gain - illegal, jail time.
Two different things. Manipulators and victims (yes, mostly fools). Senior citizens are targets for new tech scams because they don't understand new tech as much. That doesn't make it not-a-crime.
Coffeezilla has a YT channel dedicated entirely to scammers and influencers. Might be one of my new favorite YT channels even though it's been around awhile. Funny how almost all these scams lately revolve around crypto. It's no wonder DonnyMost would be in defense of these dipshits. Par for the course.
I don't see people who believe advice from speculators as victims. Victims of their own making, perhaps. A little too broad of a stroke for my taste. I'm not a legal expert, so I can't really comment on hypothetical scams.
Your defense of it in the crypto thread. You say buzzwords like sound money still which is so 2018. I mean you make claims about bitcoin being good for the energy grid when that isn't the case at all and that it's a free source of energy when again that isn't the case. It costs money to make wind turbines and solar panels and maintain them over the course of their shelf life. Things erode and break down over time costing money. Expert trained staff must be paid to make sure the turbines and panels work throughout the course of their expected shelf life. Ordering new parts takes money. Staff aren't cheap. Neither is security in this day and age where you have domestic terrorists ****ing with our own grid because #reasons. Developing batteries for energy storages involves mining areas previously undisturbed by humans, often times going into 3rd world countries, where the labor there risks their livelihood to help produce the next Lithium-Ion batteries. Crypto companies often times are in pursuit of the cheapest energy grid they can mine from, typically taking the energy grid from citizens in these 3rd world nations, and not reducing energy consumption at all. And all that energy often times is wasted in these unregulated markets which you say is a waste of time and resources for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to investigate. Your post in defense of influencers in this one. There's a pattern when the topic of crypto comes up and you defend it or promote it still. I don't view you any differently from Commodore to be honest when it comes to this topic. You shill hard. And I'll say this again. Crypto is primarily a gambling casino for people that make a steady six figure salary, likely have put their kids through college and have all this disposable income without much idea on what specifically to do with it, so they treat bitcoin like how they'd treat blowing a few grand gambling in Vegas. Then you have people who put their entire life savings into these scams and lose it all because they genuinely believed in crypto that much. It doesn't bother me as much if people want to blow a portion of their disposable income on something like this. At least you're still maintaining a roof over your head for yourself and your family. It's the people that genuinely believed in this and have found financial ruin because of the lack of consumer protection in bitcoin that typically exists in other industries. Even after a decade, bitcoin still has no actual use case in the real world despite being an industry too big to fail, and should it fail at any point in the future, who's going to be stuck footing that bill? Very likely nations of tax payers overwhelmingly affected by it's downfall. Not the scammers and certainly not the people who lost it all.
Fair enough on the broadness. I'll throw in another one here though. Maybe a bit more specific. Girl dressed extremely sexy, didn't have underwear on, danced dirty with a new guy, drank way too much, and was later raped by him. She's a victim and also a (very unpopular take) victim of her own making, perhaps. I'm not arguing if it's a victim or not (and how deserving or not). But there is harm and the manipulator's action should be illegal and face jail time for that.
Without going down the rabbit hole of this story, I agree. We're in a country where what you say means more than what you do. Of course it shouldn't be illegal to hype products and benefit. If the argument in this thread that what these guys did is illegal were the case, Trump would be in jail for about a thousand things. Say you knew this was a pump and dump (obvious). The people hyping got in on the ground floor. If you get in on day one and sell at the top with the knowledge that it is a pump and dump, and make less of a profit than the 'fraudsters', are you complicit and breaking the law? No. You recognized this for what it was and benefitted. Your allegory is flawed for obvious reasons (rape). If the people who got 'scammed' in this scenario were drunk and frivolous that's on them. I don't see the issue here other than naive/greedy people went in to this with their eyes closed. If I'm missing something, please explain.
To be clear, these guys that manipulated the market for a pump or dump should be free to go and should not faces any penalty?
Manipulated, how? By talking about it? Was there insider trading or information that the public wasn't privy to?
It is not just the suckers who are harmed. Others who don't even know these influencers exist are facing the same manipulated prices. Plainly should be illegal.
they knowingly spread misinformation about stocks they held in order to pump up the value and manipulate the market for their benefit
I guess that's also the problem I have with bitcoin. It will help bring about green technology. It'll change the way we bank. It's advertised as doing multiple things when again, there's not one single use case for it since it's existence other than to grift the gullible. If Redbull had to settle in court for the claim that they'll give you wings, all these bitcoins should be held to the same standards for all the vapid promises touted but never actually delivered. Just because some posters in this thread are aware of knowing when to back out of a scam because they're so clever apparently, doesn't make it any less immoral or ****ed up. Expecting the consumer to always do their research is like telling a consumer to do their research on bread companies when they get a stale loaf or one that gets them sick. When you buy a product, you hold certain expectations that what a company advertises is actually what is delivered. If I buy whole grain bread as that's what is on the label and what's on the back of the nutritional content but when I consume it, I'm tasting sawdust, is that supposed to be my fault? Shouldn't I also want to hold accountable the FDA for not checking that this bread company delivers the grain content they advertise as? Shouldn't I want to hold accountable the grocery store I purchased the bread from as you would think they would hold a certain standard of excellence in the products they house for customers to purchase? Shouldn't I want to hold accountable the bread company itself for selling a product that does not match what is advertised? If something like that were to occur, it would require multiple separate chains of command failing in order for me to get sawdust bread which is a relatively cheap con from a consumer perspective compared to say someone investing their life savings. If a bitcoin company promises going to the moon, that the investors finances are actual theirs and not the companies, that a company won't take investor money that does not consent to their money being pooled together in higher risk investments but still does, that for every coin created that will then somehow go into powering a wind turbine, or will save starving kids somehow, you should be held to the expectation on what you advertise you'll deliver on. If it could even do one thing extremely well that's truly innovative, that would be worthwhile. However when I see something advertised as being able to do multiple things and do them superior to existing technology, that just raises red flags. The same reason I don't trust Elon. Be excellent at one thing and I'm more inclined to trust you especially if you deliver. Claim to be the savior to fix everything and I'll immediately know you're full of ****. It takes so much time and money and effort to just develop a new tech that's good at one thing, or even something marginally better than the industry standard, much less multiple. The advertisements that said it was going to change healthcare record keeping, web3 is the new even better internet, it's going to change the banking industry, it's going to save starving kids, it's going to greenify the energy grid, it's going to help independent content creators, etc. It can't even prove itself useful for just one singular purpose other than its useful for taking advantage of customers due it's lack of consumer protection. Yet it's shilled so hard as the savior of humanity from pasty neckbeards with such poor communication skills, I seriously doubt they have enough vision to describe how to butter toast. Yet these big brains saying dumb **** like To the moon and creating acronyms like FUD are the real leaders, the real innovators that's going to save us all. Give me a ****ing break.
Was that info touted as some insider secrets or lies or was it just bullshit misdirection easily proven as such with the right research?
