Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You're making a couple implicit assumptions, here, though, such as:

  1. The attacker has enough capital to load up on HTZ calls or TSLA puts.
  2. The attacker has been planning this for a while.
  3. The attacker is a US citizen

If any of those is not true, it changes the risk/reward considerably.

The money one is easy. Even if you get a bunch of call options for free, and if you manage to temporarily push TSLA down 10% (unlikely), then you still need $900,000 in working capital in order to exercise enough of those options to be able to dump them later for a $100,000 gain.

#2 and #3 adjust the actual risk of the operation. #2 because shoving the money around quickly gives a clearer signal for the SEC to pick up on, and #3 because triggering a whole bunch of extra KYC red tape risks getting even more hounds on your trail.

BTC does have to be turned into fiat. But I can only assume, based on how rarely people who conduct ransomware scams and the like seem to get caught, that bitcoin laundering is a solved problem.

>BTC does have to be turned into fiat. But I can only assume, based on how rarely people who conduct ransomware scams and the like seem to get caught, that bitcoin laundering is a solved problem.

Furthermore, professional black hats tend to have business expenses that can be paid in bitcoin so they don't even need to convert all of it.

You can't just pay your amazon bill with it; that creates a paper trail. The feds could subpoena Amazon to find you. You can only pay other dark web denizens, and only if you trust them not to use it for something subpoena-able.

>then you still need $900,000 in working capital

Not true, you can sell to close back into the market without exercising. This is what most options traders do.

Also you can easily get them for "free" in a manner of speaking, if you use something like a bull put spread. You sell a naked leg of the position that pays for the purchase of the other leg.

There is no citizenship requirement for owning stocks of American companies. While U.S. investment securities are regulated by U.S. law, there are no specific provisions that forbid individuals who are not citizens of the U.S. from participating in the U.S. stock market.

You need to have a local broker/bank to deal in US dollars and in US stocks. While it's easy enough in the UK or Canada, it is really challenging to do for a random individual in most countries in the world.

Not true, I can walk into most banks here in South Africa and open an account that allows me to trade on foreign stock exchanges. Minimum deposits are in the order of USD5k, and require only local ID to open.

Doing this anonymously would be much harder, but that's not what you were suggesting.

Damn. Your African bank is better than my European bank.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com