I started following the crazy penny stock craze in 2020 and this story is a common sight.
Some reddit, Stocktwits, or other stock analysis site have people monitoring obscure tickers looking for anomalous volume spikes. You’re lucky if the company has more than a low quality logo as the entire website. Sometimes there’s minimal contact info, which people use to connect the company to potential real people on LinkedIn. Maybe you’ll even find the company registered in Delaware and keep digging through financial documents.
The companies are almost always random, profitless entities owned by one person acting as a a custodian for the billions of shares in the float. They promise to clean up the finances and submit paperwork so the ticker can move up through the various OTC exchange hoping to appear more credible.
The stock analysis websites are really sad because you’ll see people hoping to get rich believe anything they read. Some “shill” will say they heard from a little birdie that the company is going to merge with another stock soon, or financial documents are about to be released, or the CEO is planning to retire millions of shares (out of several billion, mind you). Of course, nothing happens and people are left bag holding for years until the next pump, or until the stock effectively goes to zero.
Bonus point if their “source” is some blogspam website that looks credible to your average penny stock inventor but will actually post whatever content you want if you send them $50.
There are people who make a nice living just pumping fake companies over and over in the penny stock market or to D-list VCs. These are the white collar equivalent of what cops call “greasy crimes,” crimes not quite serious enough to get real attention. (The dumb street crime epidemic in California is a result of further dialing back enforcement of “greasy crimes.”)
I’m sure those types are all over this NFT craze.
“I see that there are dumb people with money. I have a solution to that…”
I feel like a total sucker sometimes for attempting to do useful work when if I’d put the same effort into cheating people I’d be rich now several times over. This is truly a new golden age of the con artist. I mean we just had one for president.
I bet con artistry flourishes during any time of rapid change, confusion, and upheaval. Nobody knows what is happening so it’s easy to sell empty boxes with charisma.
Some reddit, Stocktwits, or other stock analysis site have people monitoring obscure tickers looking for anomalous volume spikes. You’re lucky if the company has more than a low quality logo as the entire website. Sometimes there’s minimal contact info, which people use to connect the company to potential real people on LinkedIn. Maybe you’ll even find the company registered in Delaware and keep digging through financial documents.
The companies are almost always random, profitless entities owned by one person acting as a a custodian for the billions of shares in the float. They promise to clean up the finances and submit paperwork so the ticker can move up through the various OTC exchange hoping to appear more credible.
The stock analysis websites are really sad because you’ll see people hoping to get rich believe anything they read. Some “shill” will say they heard from a little birdie that the company is going to merge with another stock soon, or financial documents are about to be released, or the CEO is planning to retire millions of shares (out of several billion, mind you). Of course, nothing happens and people are left bag holding for years until the next pump, or until the stock effectively goes to zero.