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Updated Investor Alert: Social Media and Investing -- Stock Rumors
Nov. 5, 2014
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Office of Investor Education and Advocacy (“OIEA”) is issuing this Investor Alert to warn investors about fraudsters who may attempt to manipulate share prices by using social media to spread false or misleading information about stocks.
Social media and the Internet in general have become important tools for investors. Investors may use social media to research particular stocks, look up background information on a broker-dealer or investment adviser, find guidance on investing strategies, receive up-to-date news, and discuss the markets with others.
While social media can provide many benefits for investors, it also presents opportunities for fraudsters. Through social media, fraudsters can spread false or misleading information about a stock to large numbers of people with minimum effort and at a relatively low cost. They can also conceal their true identities by acting anonymously or even impersonating credible sources of market information.
One way fraudsters may exploit social media is to engage in a market manipulation, such as spreading false and misleading information about a company to affect the stock’s share price. Wrongdoers may perpetuate stock rumors on social media, as well as on online bulletin boards and in Internet chat rooms.
The false or misleading rumors may be positive or negative. For example, in a “pump-and-dump” scheme, promoters “pump” up the stock price by spreading positive rumors that incite a buying frenzy and they quickly “dump” their own shares before the hype ends. Typically, after the promoters profit from their sales, the stock price drops and the remaining investors lose money. In other instances, fraudsters start negative rumors urging investors to sell their shares so that the stock price plummets and the fraudsters take advantage of buying shares at the artificially low price.
SEC Enforcement Action Involving Social Media and Market Manipulation
The SEC has charged individuals for committing securities fraud through the use of social media.
In a recent Enforcement action, SEC v. Craig, the SEC accused an individual of manipulating the share prices of two publicly traded companies by tweeting false and misleading information. The defendant allegedly tweeted rumors that federal law enforcement was investigating a technology company for fraud, and that a biopharmaceutical company had tainted drug trial results and a federal government agency seized its papers. The SEC asserted that these deceptive tweets were made from Twitter accounts mimicking established securities research firms. The hoaxes allegedly caused investors to lose more than $1.5 million.
In SEC v. McKeown and Ryan, the SEC obtained judgments against a Canadian couple who used their website (PennyStockChaser), Facebook, and Twitter to pump up the stock of microcap companies, and then profited by selling shares of those companies. The couple allegedly received millions of shares of these companies as compensation and sold the shares around the time that their website predicted the stock price would massively increase (a practice known as “scalping”). The SEC’s complaint alleged that the couple did not fully disclose the compensation they received for touting the stocks. The court ordered the couple and their companies to pay more than $3.7 million in disgorgement for profits gained as a result of the alleged conduct, and ordered the couple to pay $300,000 in civil penalties.
Investors should be aware that fraudsters may use social media to impersonate an established source of market information. For example, fraudsters may set up an account name, profile, or handle designed to mimic a particular company or securities research firm. They may go so far as to create a webpage that uses the company’s logo, links to the company’s actual website, or references the name of an actual person who works for the company.
When you receive investment information through social media, verify the identity of the underlying source. Look for slight variations or typos in the sender’s account name, profile, email address, screen name, or handle, or other signs that the sender may be an imposter. Determine whether information appearing to be from a particular company or securities research firm is authentic. When contacting a company or attempting to access its website, be sure to use contact information or the website address provided by the company itself, such as in the company’s SEC filings. Carefully type the website’s address into the address bar of your web browser.
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