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Comment by pdovy | Hacker News Reader

Here's an analogous situation - let's suppose you are a buyer in an auction for a car. You're competing with all other interested buyers to get the car, and after a bunch of back and forth, you win the auction.

Later, you find out that one of the most aggressive bidders in the auction was actually just a buddy of the seller, trying to increase the price in his/her favor but avoid at all costs actually winning the auction.

You'd probably rightfully think this was unfair, and this is exactly what spoofers are doing in an electronic market. They are generating the illusion of interest to buy or sell, without the intention to actually do so, in order to move the market in their favor.

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I don't see a problem with this. At any time, I could stop bidding and the buddy would be left with the car and the fees from the sale.

I'm not going to bid more than the car is worth to me.

The idea is, the seller just buys the car back off his buddy.

It's annoying, but I wouldn't consider it unfair. In the end, nobody forces you to pay more than you are prepared to pay.

this is not an accurate analogy. a spoofer's order is legitimate. if someone buys or sells it, the spoofer made a transaction.

No, only one order was legitimate. They placed an ask at the top level and then placed 3 bids below the top level. As soon as someone hit the ask, they cancelled the bids. The bids made it look like the market was going up. If the top level bid had been hit first, they still would have cancelled

Why is that illegal? Why doesn't it just get you kicked from the market if you do it?

It kicks you out of the market by sending you to prison.

Because it's financial fraud, and it harms the legitimacy of the market itself and it harms the other people participating in the market. It's not like banning a cheater in a video game, there are real world stakes.

If video games have real world financial stakes(say, for professional eSports players like Dota/LoL), should cheating be punishable by jail time?

Maybe.

If we are playing poker, and you cheat, you have stolen my money through fraud.

Certainly if I cheat at a casino, I'm likely going to jail.

I believe if you cheat at a casino, you are just banned and kicked out.

Also, perhaps there is a differentiation between working within the mechanics of a system to cheat, and going around a system to cheat. An example from the esports league would be the difference between using a corner case to shoot through a wall, versus hacking into the server and modifying the code.

If you don't cheat, but do something the casino doesn't approve of you are kicked out. If you actually cheat, and the casino decides it is worth it, you'll have the government come down on you too.

Bluffing in poker is not cheating, is it? This guy bluffed that he want to sell when he did not.

It actually is.

It's a scheme to get money by being dishonest; so it's stealing.

>get money by being dishonest; so it's stealing.

That isn't the definition of stealing. In fact I would argue, while it is dishonest, it isn't stealing in slightest. Stealing means you took something, without agreement, that rightfully belongs to someone else. The scheme is more accurately described as fraud than stealing.

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