CFTC charges two individuals with multi-million digital asset pump-and-dump | Hacker News Reader

CFTC charges two individuals with multi-million digital asset pump-and-dump

cftc.gov

94 pointsPragmaticPulp68 comments

"Two individuals" - one is John McAfee, and for pumping Dogecoin?

"As is typical of pump-and-dump schemes, they secretly accumulated a position in a digital asset through bitcoin trading in anticipation of price spikes following McAfee’s misleading public endorsements on social media."

$2M is small fry - I wonder how much DOGE Elon Musk holds, and how his, or anyones behavior towards these speculative coins is any different.

"and for pumping Dogecoin?"

I double-checked that it wasn't an Onion story. Who was plausibly pumped or dumped for a joke currency?

Though, I guess with a market capitalization of $5,382,875,000 the joke was already out of hand.

Dogecoin must be priciest joke in history.

Maybe the priciest intentional joke

Doge is more abundant than Bitcoin and is easier to mine, so it does have functional differences from Bitcoin. Some people may value those functional differences, so it isn't entirely a joke.

There were literally thousands of shitcoins at the time that can also be more abundant and easier to mine.

It's now widely trade and accepted, with many pairs and a low price. It's ideal to move funds, so it does serve a purpose now.

Or at least, it did, as it's clearly being manipulated: check the price and notice how, despite the strong changes in BTC/USD prices, the DOGE/BTC has been extremely stable slightly above 1*10^-6 which is extremely abnormal, and indicates someone with deep pockets is keeping the psychological price (like BCH/BTC but for different reason: someone decided it would never go below 0.1!)

This means the DOGE pump is just starting, as it is an often used trick to create positive attention: it ensures a matching performance for BTC/USD and DOGE/USD which is what influenceable people need to see to believe in a pump (a coin growing faster than BTC in USD terms will be seen in the 2nd phase of the pump)

Yeah. Once it's got a price and trades on markets, it ain't a joke anymore.

I guess this means John McAfee won't be eating his own genitalia, as he promised?

http://dickening.com/

Am I a prude? idk why I've never found this kind of humor funny

I don't believe Elon is selling

I wonder how much DOGE Elon Musk holds, and how his, or anyones behavior towards these speculative coins is any different.

So you're speculating that the world's richest man (give or take) risked a felony conviction by running an illegal Dogecoin pump-and-dump scheme? Is that right?

I'd wager that Musk's Doge-pumping buffoonery is more of a hobby than a revenue-generating side gig. If he ends up in federal prison, It'll be for cooking Tesla's books.

Second this. I don't think he owns any asset he promotes besides TSLA. The rest are clearly for the lulz.

Can someone do a crime even if they don't mean to? Like, maybe he did not want to take advantage of that but his actions resulted on him pumping DOGE.

Something like the difference between involuntary manslaughter and murder?

December 2017 were crazy times in crypto. John McAfee would promote a "Coin of the day" for like two weeks straight and the price would sky rocket immediately. People had bots to watch for his tweets to programmatically place market buys on exchanges right away before the pump in price from flood of people buying the coin.

> “Manipulative and fraudulent schemes, like that alleged in this case, undermine the integrity and development of digital assets and cheat innocent people out of their hard-earned money,” said Acting Director of Enforcement Vincent McGonagle.

Even if they explicitly conducted a pump-and-dump, nobody was cheated here.

There doesn't need to be a disclosure notice on shitcoin shilling for a reasonable person to assume that it is a risky investment that may result in 100% lows.

Meanwhile, thousands are engaging in this exact behavior and going unprosecuted.

The fact that these specific people were chosen for the enforcement of this specific not-crime is, to me, highly suspect.

>There doesn't need to be a disclosure notice on shitcoin shilling for a reasonable person to assume that it is a risky investment that may result in 100% lows.

Where do you draw the line? If "shitcoins" are open season for fraudsters, what's next? micro-cap/penny stocks? gamestop/hertz?

the agency involved has no jurisdiction, unless Congress recently changed something. there is nothing to see here.

this has nothing to do with anyone's opinions on what happened, the people exercising that opinion don't have the authority to. next!

> Even if they explicitly conducted a pump-and-dump, nobody was cheated here.

A pump-and-dump is a scheme designed to cheat people. The cheat is to deliver misleading statements to convince others to purchase something, while quietly doing the opposite of what you're promoting.

Pump and dump schemes are a well-known type of fraud: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pumpanddump.asp

> Meanwhile, thousands are engaging in this exact behavior and going unprosecuted.

That doesn't make this right.

We can't catch and prosecute everyone, but that doesn't mean we can't catch and prosecute anyone.

*100% loss

Not a surprise.

A cryptocurrency scam.

John McAfee scamming.

when a rich person tweets something and makes a ton of money it's market manipulation.

When a hedge fund tells a journo to write an article it's business as usual.

To be clear: I think both are worthy of the same scrutiny. The double standard is what bothers me.

hell, i'd argue being rich isn't even the qualifier. I'd say it's anyone that's not a part of that financial system.

The powers that be in finances are nervous, the things that gave them advantage and the edge, some legit, some not, are all becoming increasingly available to retail.

Mean while we allow stock shorts.. and failures to deliver to constantly roll over or be hidden in sneak behind closed door actions.

My problem with shorts is that FTDs are not punished. The punishment for a hedge fund, or other large financial firm should be painful. CEO throwing temper tantrums on Bloomberg painful. Not crippling or debilitating, but just painful enough to make these bag holders think about the potential consequences of their actions before they short.

An FTD should have an automatic fine and liquidation event to allow immediate delivery.

When I don't pay my bills my services get cut off and I get fined. Favourably treating company failures differently than consumers is about as anti-capitalist as things can get. This dichotomy is prima facie evidence that the stock market has been designed to be in favor of whoever has the biggest bag of cash/deepest rolodex and against the American people who despite our massive exposure to the markets have virtually no say in their operations nor the individual companies therein.

I agree 100%

Neither deserves any scrutiny. So long as influential people exist, there will exist opportunities to profit off that influence. Forbidding this fully is impossible, which means that criminalizing it just makes unfair selective enforcement possible. This isn't justice, it's getting caught with your hand in the communal rich-influencer cookie jar.

Legalize insider trading, legalize pump and dumps, let the chips fall where they may. It's happening either way, so lets just be honest about it.

just throw the sheep to the wolves, got it

If what you are looking for is a kind of wild west (legalize white collar crime), you honestly may as well legalize murder, and let victims of white collar crime practice vigilantism

When you say it’s impossible to “forbid”, you probably mean “prevent” as it’s most definitely possible to forbid it. Either way, the situation is the same with any crime. Obviously that is not a reason to legalize anything in particular.

The first rule of governance is only make laws which can be enforced without bias. If you can't enforce the law without bias, it shouldn't be a law. Put another way, the government shouldn't pick winners and losers.

I don't see how this can hold, without some severe restrictions on what you actually mean by 'bias.'

As a kind of silly example, I posit that muggings closer to police stations are more likely to result in an arrest. Now we have bias in enforcement based on police station location. Do we need to build floating police stations equidistant from every place a mugging could take place? And this is generously assuming muggings in police stations are discounted from this analysis. If you don't, perhaps muggings in police stations are legal?

I strongly suspect you're somehow only applying this particular standard to (potential) white collar crime, which seems absurd.

I agree its a challenge many laws don't meet, and perhaps I wasn't clear, so lets take another chance to clarify. Lets take your example. Muggings have a clear victim. A mugger clearly used violence or threat of violence to forcibly remove someone else's property against their will. Now, if the Law said only its only illegal to mug citizens (tourists, illegal aliens, etc), then clearly the law is picking winners and losers here. If the law says its illegal to mug anyone, but reports of muggings to tourists went categorically uninvestigated, then the government is choosing winners and losers, not via legislation, but by implementation, which is also wrong. In this case, the fix isn't the mugging law, but the implementation.

I'm a baseball fan. Everyone knows that everyone cheats in the game of baseball. Whether its hiding small things like pine tar, or like the Astros using electronic devices relaying signals. When there's marginal enforcement, and marginal discipline, then its not really a law, and its only used against the current regime's enemies so to speak. So, why keep it as a law? Further, if we make all electronic communication devices legal, then pitchers and catchers can have an ear piece, and this concept of signs and sign stealing is moot.

The same applies to all governance. If you can't apply the same laws uniformly, then they become the tool of the state to suppress its enemies, i.e. choosing winners and losers.

[1] - https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/astros-scandal-time...

Both examples are very bad. Surely the “bias” in the rule referred to the person committing the crime, not the target. And the rules in baseball are neither laws, nor apparently enforced with bias. Seems like they’re not enforced at all.

Of course it would be nice with bias free laws in some abstract sense. But I’ve never heard anyone say it was an absolute precondition. Then we’d have no laws.

Why is that the first rule of governance?

When, where, has there ever been a law that is not enforced with bias?

According to whom?

Indeed. EVERYONE involved in finance, from Warren Buffett on down, talks their book. EVERY transaction in finance involves asymmetric information. Might as well stop pretending these facts aren't true.

They aren't accused of talking their book. They're accused of fraudulent statements.

Warren Buffet saying that he's confident in Coca Cola's business model while holding a stake in Coca Cola is fine.

Warren Buffer saying he's going to buy a lot of Coca Cola stock because he loves it (driving the price up) but then secretly unloading his Coca Cola position amid the resulting price bump would be a fraudulent pump and dump scheme.

Let's be clear here: The accused perpetrators were using their platforms to endorse coins for the purpose of selling those coins to unsuspecting victims.

Warren Buffet on down through the layers of non-criminal financial managers (that set is not as big as it should be) do not lie about their holdings. They do not pretend that a investment is good simply so other people will want it, drive up the price, then sell. That is what John McAfee is accused of doing.

A big difference.

Really? Let the lies fly?

So long as influential people exist, and opportunities exist to profit off that influence then there will be a need for state agencies to police them (the influential people). As Elon Musk found when he was investigated following his promise to take Tesla private at $4.20 a share (I hope my memory has got that right). He had all sorts of sanctions made against him, and it was just stoned tweeting.

One of the justifications for a state is to protect the weak from the strong. It is imaginable that it could be done away with (the rule of law protecting the ignorant from the insiders) but if you are going to imagine, imagine what that world would look like.

>Legalize insider trading, legalize pump and dumps, let the chips fall where they may. It's happening either way, so lets just be honest about it.

Fuck that. That kind of thing will give us another Great Depression faster than we can blink.

"Forbidding this fully is impossible" applies to all crime. The correct inference isn't, "so fuck it", it's, "We need enforcement sufficient to keep the crime in check."

The reason not to legalize this specifically is that the more people perceive a market as rigged, the less they'll invest. Our capital markets, for all their flaws, make it much easier for people to create economic value. If you legalize scams, etc, not only do you harm honest participants, you harm the economy as a whole.

>when a rich person tweets something and makes a ton of money it's market manipulation.

>When a hedge fund tells a journo to write an article it's business as usual.

Did the hedge funds also secretly accumulated positions in assets, deceptively promoted the assets through media as valuable long-term investments, then sold their holdings as prices rose sharply following the deceptive endorsements? Because that's what macfee is being indicted for, not because he "tweets something and makes a ton of money".

...Yes, isn't that the point of a hedge fund? They probably follow the rules a bit more, but of course the hedge fund has a position. Their 200 page quarterly SEC filing (which will be released to the public in 2 weeks) clearly indicated that on page 127.

Hedge funds manipulate markets:

https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/research/cfa-digest/2013/11/...

Hedge funds routinely refuse to disclose their abnormal holdings and sell to realize profits.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43303849?seq=1

Former manager Jim Cramer admits as much:

https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/2918951-g-hudson/1026551-...

Sure I don't have some gotcha smoking gun that links some third string financial columnist to a hedge funds actions, but if I did I wouldn't be blabbering about it here. I'd report it up SEC, retain a lawyer and collect my reward.

>Hedge funds manipulate markets:

>https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/research/cfa-digest/2013/11/...

A quick skim of the article suggests that they're doing it to make their own funds look better, rather than as some sort of pump&dump scheme that you suggest.

>Hedge funds routinely refuse to disclose their abnormal holdings and sell to realize profits.

>https://www.jstor.org/stable/43303849?seq=1

the first paragraph of the introduction says why they're confidential in the first place: to avoid getting front-runned and to avoid free-riding. I don't see anything nefarious here, unless they're also simultaneously deceiving people into investing.

>Former manager Jim Cramer admits as much:

>https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/2918951-g-hudson/1026551-...

>First information is widely distributed to make investors wonder about the company and to put fear into those longs that hold the stock. Next, high volume shorting takes place to drive the company's share price down.

Again, there's nothing wrong with holding a position in a company and spreading news about it, as long as your holdings are disclosed. Short-sellers do this all the time when they publish short reports.

How do you call the short bets? Why is that not accumulating positions then used media to convince ppl to sell stocks making they're positions profitable.

Hedge Funds publicly disclose their position

It's disingenuous to say that quarterly disclosures are meaningful sources of information on the intra-day behaviors of hedge funds.

They regularly short stocks, then tell everyone why that stock is a bad investment, prompting people to sell off and tank the price, resulting in them making $$ on the short positions, so.......yeah?

That is literally what Melvin Capital was doing with GME originally, and that is what sparked the GME short squeeze back in January.

Isn't Jim Cramer's entire existence based on pumping and dumping stocks for hedge funds?

As long as he's not cooperating with them and/or not holding covert positions, he can say whatever he wants.

Besides everything being "securities fraud[0]" tweets are only market manipulation if they are false/deceptive. With the right disclosures it's business as usual.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

"Funding secured!"

To make the old school scams believable you need to wrap it in some high tech story that people believe but don't understand.

Can someone tell me how this differs from what McAfee 2.0 (Michael Saylor) is doing as we speak?

It differs in that: he's not dumping it and his company is following proper public disclosure guidelines.

1) MicroStrategy is taking a substantial position in BTC before disclosing publicly. Subsequently he is on a PR tour de force telling everyone and their mother that they need to invest in BTC. That seems pretty similar to what McAfee was doing.

2) On 2-12-21, MicroStrategy transferred 50,000 shares of Class A company stock to Alcantara LLC, of which Saylor is the sole owner. Until that date Alcantara hadn’t received any MicroStrategy stock, or any other securities, since March 2012. These 50,000 shares have been transferred by the LLC "as a gift" to a charitable foundation for no consideration.

What evidence do you have that he isn't "dumping" it?

I'm sorry but how's transferring his company stock to some LLC evidence of dumping? This is done all the time for a litany of reasons.

Anyways since you want evidence, you're welcome to check the company's disclosures to see that they aren't dumping bitcoin, in fact they seem to be buying more [1]. This disclosure is from today (5th March 2021).

As for the gift of shares to a charitable foundation, Michael Saylor has been funding the Saylor Academy [2] since 1999 so it seems like it very well could be for that or another valid charitable cause. It's also not evidence of dumping.

[1] https://www.microstrategy.com/en/investor-relations/financia...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saylor_Academy

He's marketing his own company's stock as an investment vehicle for Bitcoin, shilling Bitcoin, and then dumping his own stock. He's clearly not planning to dump Bitcoin, otherwise the whole plan goes up in smoke.

Seems like a pretty sweet setup for an experienced fraudster.

https://twitter.com/michael_saylor/status/133755689074262425...

CFTC doesn't have jurisdiction over this. They only regulate derivatives and verrrry limited authority over spot market activity that affects derivatives.

As this is in coordination with DOJ and the SEC, this is just tacked on to see what sticks.

I don't see the securities fraud (SEC) or the commodities fraud (CFTC) sticking. Therefore, I don't see the money laundering or wire fraud or the associated conspiracy charges sticking either. Unless they traded Greyscale ETFs or some other unregistered security, which would be a dumb and illiquid way to trade fairly liquid spot assets.

The spot markets are regulated like products. So this is a FTC issue, too bad they have no teeth. But the FTC knows what digital assets are too.

NY supreme court ruled that tether was covered under commodities law last year, so CFTC can have it stick.

Crypto is either a commodity, or a security. It's not outside the law

CFTC is a federal agency, they regulate commodity derivatives, not commodities, a New York court doesn't evolve the case law for a federal agency. And none of this has anything to do with "crypto being recognized as a particular asset class". Nobody is arguing about the CFTC saying crypto is a commodity, the CFTC has limited powers in what they can do with something being a commodity because they regulate commodity derivatives.

here is something that shows the current state of the CFTC's authority being unresolved by federal courts, specifically regarding spot commodities

https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2018/10/recent...

CFTC has had jurisdiction over crypto for a while but if anyone was going to challenge that I could imagine McAfee being the one.

that's not the point, the CFTC still has limited authority even if it declares something to be under its authority.

here is something that shows the current state of the CFTC's authority being unresolved by federal courts, specifically regarding spot commodities

https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2018/10/recent...

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