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Comment by AndrewBissell | Hacker News Reader

As the article points out, if you do this in enough size to make serious money, you're highly likely to get caught.

Yes, but there's a lot of room between ~$150k (that the defrauded bitcoins are worth) and what counts as "serious money" that will get you caught -- contradicting the clickbait thesis of "you couldn't have made more money" than the hacker. This is especially true in an environment of a stock that's heavily shorted already.

And if you really want to be pedantic, the hacker has made $0 from it so far, since the Bitcoins haven't been transferred anywhere to cash out. Which is pretty easy to beat :-p

The SEC frequently goes after proverbial insider trading dentists who make ill gotten gains in the $100K range. Given the intense focus there would be to catch the market manipulators, a sub-$1 million haul wouldn't be much protection.

Those types are caught because they're people who do virtually no active trading and then buy an individual stock while related (and connected by phone/email contact) to an insider. Not day traders who have joined a massive herd of the world's favorite stock to short.

Yea, but it's been shown that well placed posts on wallstreetbets can cause trading activity. A post like "some of you guys are cool. Don't hold any tesla puts on Wednesday" might be enough to generate a bunch of trades you can hide under.

But until you did, you would have made more money than the Twitter hacker.

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