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Comment by mattiss | Hacker News Reader

Something with stock manipulation could work. Buy a ton of options in some company, like Palm for instance. Then on the release of some hot new gadget, like the Pre, pay a ton of people to wait outside the doors of the vendors. Initial buzz will be that Palm is going to strike it big. Cash in.

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This reminds me of a guy which used Craigslist to hire decoys for armored truck robbery getaway:

http://news.cnet.com/bank-robber-hires-decoys-on-craigslist-...

If it were in a movie you'd say 'no way', but to see it in real life... I'd hate to be that guard, being pepper-sprayed is not nice, but otherwise this 'heist' has me with ambiguous feelings towards the robber.

However, there would be a record of the entire thing in Amazon's system, not to mention that a huge audience of potential Mechanical Turk workers would see the offer - it seems likely that at least one would be suspicious and try to notify an authority.

Is that actually illegal?

Yes.

What if they told people to stand in line at the store next to Palm? Since there's a finite amount of space, they'll naturally overflow. To an outside observer, it looks like all these folks are standing in line for Palm - particularly if you do the same thing at 1000 locations nationwide, and let journalists connect the dots.

It's also far less traceable. Instead of paying 50,000 people to stand in line outside of Palm, you're paying 50 people each to stand in line outside of 1000 different local businesses, whose only connection is that they happen to be next to a Palm store. A just-as-plausible explanation is that you're organizing a "buy local!" protest that day.

You could also pay people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to pay turkers to stand in line, making things even harder to track. Now instead of one guy paying 50 people each to stand in front of 1000 different locations, you have 50 guys, each one of which is paying people to stand outside Subway, or McDonalds, or Verizon, or the corner bookstore, or whatever happens to be next to that Palm store.

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