Thru the eyes of a prosecutor......I am very serious.......
But a prosecutor doesn't really represent the victims. He represents the State. Regardless of whether the victims should have known better than to invest, there's the question of whether laws have been broken.
Scam companies violate the securities laws in all kinds of ways; that qualifies them for an SEC lawsuit alleging various kinds of civil fraud. If criminal law enforcement gets involved, well, hey, what penny scam doesn't run the risk of being nailed for wire fraud? Did management work together to perpetrate the fraud, or work with promoters to do so? Conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and securities fraud itself.
But if it's merely a question of a company whose stock is frontloaded by social media "groups" and then dumped, that's on the people who bought in the frontloaders' coattails. Theoretically, the frontloaders could be litigated or prosecuted for securities manipulation, but that rarely happens.
