It's still against the law. Eight social media influencers charged in $100 million stock manipulation scheme - UPI.
The scheme reached the $100 million level. I guess that is the power of amplification by Twiter and Discord.
The complaint accuses Perry Matlock, Edward Constantin, Thomas Cooperman, Gary Deel, Mitchell Hennessey, Stefan Hrvatin and John Rybarcyzk of orchestrating the scheme. The SEC also accuses Daniel Knight of aiding and abetting the scheme by promoting the defendants on a podcast.
Since January 2020, seven of the individuals promoted themselves as successful traders, according to the SEC. They gained thousands of followers on Twitter and Discord. They would then purchase stocks and encourage their followers to do the same, causing the price to rise. However, the defendants then sold the stock without disclosing that they had done so.
There is more. Personally, I expect we will find out that a lot of fraud has been going on in the past few years. People with no knowledge of stocks or options were placing bets via online apps, and when the market went up, they mostly won those bets. Except the Millennials and the Zoomers think that no previous generations have anything to teach them, and when the market went down, they lost interest in it. Some of them lost a lot of money, I'm guessing, and there was one high-profile case of a kid who killed himself because he didn't understand how options were valued.
Do you know what the primary equation that defines a balance sheet is? Do you know how to read a statement of cash flows? Maybe you should before you buy stocks. Do you know the difference between a Put and a Call option? Do you know what options traders mean when they refer to a haircut? Do you know what a strike price is? Maybe you should before you invest in options.
But learning is hard work, and math is hard, or you're "just not good at math," or something. And besides, learning about those things isn't "cool" (or whatever the kids say today). And they were just "investing" in stocks because that is what all the cool kids were doing. (What they were actually doing is called speculating - at least in most cases. Investors can articulate why they bought a stock and what might cause them to sell.)
Anyway, there is a lot of good info in the linked article, and elsewhere.
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