[jerguismi]

> It isn't discriminatory, it's protective.

I think it is both. The regulation is removing the upside risk as well as the downside risk. Many professional investors are investing to real stupid things and losing their money, it is not that difficult to find examples.

[sanswork]

Is it easy to find examples of ones who have lost so much that they are literally poor?

[mikeyouse]

That's why these rules exist in the first place.. People like "The Jackal of Wall St.":

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/31/the-best-co...

Or the boiler rooms & microcap fraud in the 1980s/1990s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcap_stock_fraud

And yep, it was still happening even before the accredited investor criteria was relaxed;

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/five-defendants-charged...

[sanswork]

Which of those left accredited investors poor and not just down?

[mikeyouse]

All of them? Boiler rooms and stock frauds don't settle for a little bit of money, when they find someone to swindle, they take all of their money. It got so bad during the Great Depression that people actually hung bankruptcy judges.. Google "stock market fraud life savings" and you can find a litany of people who lost everything to these scams.

[sanswork]

Do you have any actual examples? I googled your suggested term and found a bunch of people outside the US(lots in China a few in the UK, one in Canada) and a bunch of others who wouldn't qualify as accredited investors.

The great depression started before the SEC existed and was a completely different world.

Back to my original question I asked if it was easy to find examples. I have no doubt that you can find a few since fraud happens. But I think you'll find it difficult to find more than a handful.

[infinite8s]

The creation of the SEC was a response to the stock market crash that let to the Great Depression.

[microtherion]

Some people lost a lot of money on prosper.com, and at least in some cases, it was known that it was money they couldn't really afford to lose. See e.g. this (and be sure to read the last comment): http://www.bloggingawaydebt.com/2007/01/would-you-lend-75000...

[sanswork]

I've tried to find more up to date information on him since that post is over 7 years old now and can't. Do you have anything more current or more details on the user pensioner?

ericscc.com appears to be gone as well as any of the other prosper forums I've found links to. Not really familiar with the site so is it basically dead or moved out of p2p or something?

[microtherion]

The one forum site that still seems to be active is prospers.org, where pensioner was active as late as 2014. Not much conversation about prosper anymore, though (The old timers still there have thoroughly soured on p2p lending).

prosper.com itself is still in business. AFAIK they have pivoted to a much more conservative lending model. People who invested before 2010 or so generally lost money, some of them a lot of it, but the current model may be sustainable.

[sanswork]

Thanks yeah it looks like he lost ~$350k from his last post? That's a lot but it shouldn't be enough to make any accredited investor actually poor.

[nunez]

So he basically wanted to get into niche payday loans without considering the fact that the interest rates are really high for a really good reason...