meanwhile, it was a classic pump and dump scheme
that this one had a twist. The Securities and
Exchange Commission charging eight social media influencers with securities fraud
. They said they were part of 100 and$14
million scheme to use twitter and discord to manipulate the
price of stocks. The group of influencers known as
atlas trading collectively had about 1.5 million followers. They
purchased those stocks that had low trading volume and told
their followers to buy them soon after they quote regularly
sold those shares without ever disclosing their plans to dump
the securities while they were promoting them. The sec
saying in a news release that one of the defendants
was recorded on a voice chat saying, quote,
we're robbing effing idiots of their money. I mean
the allegations in this absolutely stunning here, Chloe baker
, I mean this is another classic case of regulation
, not keeping up with technology, we know that
, you know, the influencer space has been under
regulated in part because I think regulators at this point
still don't quite understand how it works. I actually
think this is not an entirely different conversation than the
one that we're having about celebrities and influencers promoting Cryptocurrency
obviously that not being, you know, they're not
being malice in that they're not actually trying to pump
and dump in that situation. But again, these
high risk areas and these influencers are almost going unchecked
in this respect by promoting these stocks. So I
wonder if this is going to serve as sort of
an example, moving forward of more regulation and cracking
down on the influencer space here.