Here he is: u/InterestingNews1
At this point, it's crystal clear he's running a pump and dump scam. The microcap size, uniform positivity, irrational confidence, diversity, and extreme cherrypicking all point to a single direction. So I went in and looked at some of his posts.
- I googled the text of his posts, and they only appear here on this subreddit; he doesn't duplicate them elsewhere. Judging from the viewcount/upvote ratio, he's getting really decent exposure, about 10k views per post. And you can see here, he's really concerned with his viewcount: http://ift.tt/2yEtD0E. r/investing users are the perfect target audience, the type of novice retail investors that are every stock promoter's dream. How much conversion can he expect?
- He's not getting paid by companies for his actions, he owns the stocks. This is because the range of his stock choices is wide enough that it's extremely unlikely for him to form business relationships with the companies he's pumping.
- What's the bump on the stocks after he pushes them? I haven't bothered to actually look at the charts. But unless he deletes his posts, we have a pretty clear track record which can be analyzed, to see if he's making money. This will be harder for us than him because we don't know when he sells out.
- Many of his stocks are US stocks, and his English is at a native level but not a collegiate level. Assuming he's in the US, what he's doing is blatantly illegal. His little "disclaimer" at the bottom is a joke. But if he's not in the US, can he get away with it reliably? Is foreign residence a new avenue of opportunity for stock promoters, providing enough jurisdictional friction that the SEC stops caring?
- What do you think about the power of the SEC's statistical models anyway? I doubt they browse r/investing. They have to catch people purely based on their trading activity, and then find the real-world correlations afterward. What are the chances the SEC will notice him from trading activity, and if they notice, will they even bother to take action? Nevermind banning him, it'd be much more interesting if the SEC came around.
- Why is he pumping here on r/investing, rather than r/wallstreetbets? I think he'd have much better conversion rates over there. At WSB, the audience size, lack of sophistication, willingness to throw money at random pumps instead of index, and availability of free funds are much more amenable to being scammed. Has he already been banned there, or is he unaware of the opportunity?
Submitted October 21, 2017 at 10:43PM by kiroist http://ift.tt/2yIbbX4
