With my experience at running technology and security at a large fintech. It would relatively easy to purchase stock anonymously with a stolen identify. KYC(K

With my experience at running technology and security at a large fintech. It would relatively easy to purchase stock anonymously with a stolen identify. KYC(Know your customer) checks that online financial firms use to verify identity revolve around credit report data that can easily be bought or hacked. Think of all the online companies that offer access to your credit report. Any foreign actor could get a brokerage account with relative ease compared to hacking a major social network. For the SEC to investigate, they would have to go through multiple companies to find the account. First would be the exchanges to search for suspicious trades. Next the clearing brokerage firms which online fintechs use to do the trades and then lastly the the fintech that stolen account was created on. Much longer to investigate than it takes for the money to settle from the trade and to get money out of the account. Also there is a good change that you wouldn't trip any of the online FI's monitoring. If the money went out to the same account it came in on, that isn't that suspicious and happens all the time. The cash transfers would generate SAR(suspicious activity report) but still that would take a while for government to process and investigate. Authentication of a person is broken in the US and needs to be fixed. We can't rely on credit report data and SSN.