Anyone who spends any amount of time on Twitter, and, more specifically, the corner of Twitter known as FinTwit, knows that there’s lots of talk about specific stocks and whether they’re about to take off to the moon or on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. For the most part, I tend to ignore the fray and stick to what I know best: SEC filings.
But when a filing for an obscure company caught my attention last spring, I quickly found myself going through the looking glass, so to speak. Something about the level of chatter struck me as highly unusual. As we learned last week, that company was part of a Pump and Dump scheme orchestrated by a guy on Twitter who had over 70,000 followers, according to a complaint filed by the SEC and DOJ. I wrote about this latest twist of events for Bloomberg Opinion.
While the SEC has gone after Elon Musk and John McAfee over statements on Twitter, this is only the second time that they’ve gone after people who have lots of followers on Twitter, but who aren’t exactly household names. It’s a pretty safe bet that there are more of these to come. Stay tuned!
