12 ms·

A SpaceX engineer's dark web insider trading sparks an SEC first

144 points by leephillips 6y ago

xt00 6y ago
TLDR: the guy was selling tips on the “dark web” in 2017 about stocks going up or down totaling 27k in Bitcoin. Sounds like he was caught when he purchased some personal info of people and used that info to open new trading accounts.
- RedShift1 6y ago
  So the charge should include identity theft?
  - minitoar 6y ago
    "Officer, I didn't know these were stolen identities when I purchased them"
rtpg 6y ago
> A criminal complaint by the Justice Department details a string of investments that Jones made in the spring of 2017, mostly through an unnamed conspirator’s account, based on phony insider info provided by the undercover fed. That summer, the relationship would flip: Jones told the undercover agent on July 25 what an unnamed company's earnings would be, investing $5,000 on his behalf. Two days later, the numbers came out. They were identical. You know what? I'm getting a bit tired of things that smell an awful lot like entrapment. Way too many things where you have a law enforcement official seemingly start an interaction, and the "actual crime" only happening later in the sequencing. I'm not going to shed too many tears at people getting arrested for like... fake insider trading or whatever. But there's a lot of stories of people getting put away for really nasty stuff where the details make it _extremely probable_ that the undercover agent was extremely important in moving things forward. I feel like there needs to be some stronger requirements before pulling off these kinds of schemes, instead of LEO seemingly trying to fill some quota by going out hunting for people to fall into these traps.
- slim 6y ago
  in some countries entrapment is explicitly and strictly forbidden. like if law enforcement has an infiltrated agent, it's a risk that could void the case
  - martin8412 6y ago
    And in some countries entrapment isn't even a thing. You broke the law, you'll get punished regardless if coerced by a cop or not.
    - varispeed 6y ago
      With good enough manipulation techniques you can make anyone do anything, so basically services can send LEO to groom undesirable citizen into committing a crime and then lock them up legally. It's just slightly more sophisticated than Soviets did.
      - martin8412 6y ago
        Yea, you can absolutely do that. The country I'm speaking about is Denmark. The police can also break down your door without a warrant and use anything they find against you. Them having entered illegally may have consequences for their unemployment(though it won't), but the evidence is still admissible in court.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Like where, North Korea? Did you spend even 5 minutes thinking about what you just said? Civilians rely on cops for instructions and directions. Furthermore a cop can order around civilians under threat of force. If a cop forces you to commit a crime and then jails you, they can extort you for money corruption will be through the roof. Thats what we have in Russia, the security services are superbly corrupt and regularly extort people. At least there they are breaking the law while doing so. You are suggesting we make it legal here.
- josefx 6y ago
blunte 6y ago
One would assume that SpaceX engineers would be smarter than the average person, but based on the details of this story he doesn’t sound very bright at all.
- 4gotunameagain 6y ago
  Well intellect can be broad or narrow too. source: I can be very smart and incredibly stupid too
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  To be a successful white collar criminal, you need to be cunning more than smart. These are very different qualities.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    And have a good attorney.
- polytely 6y ago
  I've slowly come to the realisation that the majority of very smart people are only smart in the field they work in.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - numpad0 6y ago
    Maybe the majority of well paid people are paid for their behavioral predictability than ingenuities...
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      That's generally the case for everything in our lives, though. Part of what keeps civilization going is minimizing variance / maximizing predictability of people. In modern societies, we try to keep unpredictable people away from anything important. In the most extreme cases, we lock them up in prisons and mental hospitals. In less extreme cases, we gatekeep: for example, you have to go through a psychological evaluation to get your pilot's license, driver's license, to be allowed to own a firearm, or be employed in certain positions. Degree of such gatekeeping is usually proportional to the damage wrong behavior can cause. And then in general, we have laws and cultures and social customs that slowly grind us into shape, every day of our lives, making us ever so slightly more similar to each other with every interaction, so that we can predict each others' behaviors and cooperate effectively. (I bring this up sometimes in context of AI/ML, where I complain that modern ML is made of black boxes with unpredictable failure modes. The usual reply is, "but humans are black boxes too!". Well, they aren't completely opaque - thanks to shared hardware architecture and "theory of mind", and to the degree it's not enough, society ensures predictability is maximized.)
mylons 6y ago
what does the person’s job have anything to do with this?
- vasco 6y ago
  Higher click-through rate title.
  - mylons 6y ago
    indeed -- also hilarious that pointing out the clickbait gets downvotes.
williesleg 6y ago
Dark is racist.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
The article is worth a read. The perpetrator was apparently doing a lot more than just insider trading on the dark web: > As far back as 2016, the account with that moniker bought names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers on the underground marketplaces that traffic in illicit online goods. He took that personal info to open banking accounts in the names of unwitting strangers, and used those accounts to make trades based on insider information he gleaned from others The claimed amount of Bitcoin he earned from these activities is low. Certainly low in the context of what a talented engineer should be earning. Either he’s hiding his actual profits, or he was simply doing this for the thrill of doing criminal things on the dark web. Strange case.
- paulpauper 6y ago
  it's space-x, not google. the salaries are probably not that great, especially after taking into account living expenses . $20k in net profit is a nice even for an engineer.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    I assume SpaceX is like the game industry. People are overworked and underpaid because their work is their passion.
    - yaacov 6y ago
      I used to work at an aerospace startup with a lot of ex-SpaceX people. They worked 60 hrs/week and felt like they were on vacation.
  - blobbers 6y ago
    It really isn't. SpaceX is in LA, and engineers that can get jobs there can easily work at google. $20K in net profit is a drop in the bucket.
- Traster 6y ago
  I'm not actually that surprised. There are lots of people who have decent paying jobs, but want more, and it's not as easy as saying "I earn $100k working at X, I can easily earn an extra 30k doing it freelance on the weekend". It is extraordinarily difficult to actually leverage your skills in a way that earns immediate profits - especially since your skills are often specializing in a niche that your company probably dominates. 27k for a stupid stock prediction scam seems like a decent pay off if you think your technical expertise means you have an extremely low chance of getting caught. Maybe you would be more willing to do this if you worked for a guy who repeatedly flouts SEC rules an brags about it....
syntaxing 6y ago
I’m curious if it’s $27K of 2017 Bitcoin or today’s Bitcoin. If it’s the latter it’s $385K.
- moeris 6y ago
  You mean former?
AzzieElbab 6y ago
There is something wrong with risk vs reward in this story. A spaceX engineer ruins his life for 27k?
- danaliv 6y ago
  People are motivated by way more than just money.
- ufmace 6y ago
  I've always believed that most crimes are committed more because of the thrill of it, the desire to feel like you got something extra illicitly because you're more clever and ruthless than everyone else, etc, than because of a rational evaluation of the financial upside.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  I wonder if he hid other profits in other crypto accounts. Or perhaps he viewed this as testing the waters and building a reputation before he scaled up. It’s possible that he just enjoyed the thrill of doing crimes and getting fun money. During the first crypto-mining boom, my friend in corporate IT caught multiple people trying to use office electricity and networks to mine Bitcoin with hidden hardware. One person even tried to hide their mining machine above the drop ceiling tiles. They couldn’t have been making much money relative to their salary, but they liked the idea of being clever enough to get free money for themselves at the expense of someone else.
- paulpauper 6y ago
  SpaceX is not Facebook, Goldman Sachs, or Google. There are probably no stock options or other nice perks. The salaries are probably not that great. Also, after taking into account taxes and other expenses, there is probably not that much left over, so $27k is a nice bonus.
  - godelski 6y ago
    From what I know you'd get the equivalent of a junior software engineer and with no benefits. So like $90k-$120k/yr. More if you're Sr, but again, this is total. And let's be real, $30k is still a good bonus even at a $200k take home. That's an extra 15% (possibly not even taxable given the nature).
superkuh 6y ago
If the SEC is going to start caring about insider trading they should definitely take a look at what the members of the US congress did at the start of the sars-cov-2 pandemic. What this looks like to me is just the SEC with it's well known hate for SpaceX looking to hurt them any way they can.
- justapassenger 6y ago
  What known hate for SpaceX in SEC?
  - edoceo 6y ago
    Maybe they assume SEC hated Elon, and therefore SpaceX too? Either way, citation needed
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Covid-19 is not a corporation, so the notion of "insider trading of non-public corporate information" makes zero sense. Insider Trading isn't some vague catch-all for non-public information. It has a specific meaning that relates to publicly held corporations.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_trading_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra... Sounds like you need to catch up to date on modern law. The STOCK Act passed in 2012 makes this "insider trading".
hutzlibu 6y ago
Hypothetical question: how would it work out in the long run, if there would be no such thing as illegal "insider trading"? Because I suspect the very few things that surface up, are only a very small tip of a very big iceberg anyway, with all the elite managers/politicians interacting in pretty much closed circles, I cannot imagining it is not happening on a large scale and only some small fish like this one get caught now and then. So, how could things work out, if this would just be legal? Devastating to the economy? Much more manipulation of the stock market? Or even less, as people are more aware of it? Also, I cannot imagine myself not doing it, if I would have valuable information, I also do not really understand it all, when it would be considered insider trading and when not - but I can imagine this is the case for many people. The term seems just not clear defined to me, so maybe it is then doing more bad than good?
- paulpauper 6y ago
  Probably the majority of tips do not yield much profit. The problem takes cares of itself in that as the information becomes more public, the market adjusts accordingly.
- hervature 6y ago
  I don’t think that people are concerned about the trades but rather the perverse incentives it creates in the long term. Incentivizes bribes for officials on classified committees, it encourages employees to be more active in trading versus actually helping the company, investing would be pointless as the price would be set by insiders. By definition, any trade against an insider would be bad. It’s tough to predict the effects on the economy but I think it’s reasonable to say these behaviors are suboptimal for an economy. It’s a valid question because even Nobel laureates in economics have advocated for removing insider trader laws. However, my opinion is that academics are short sighted by their assumptions of the world. Namely, they assume that the agents would still try to maximize the well being of the company. No model is sufficiently sophisticated to take into account what happens when people get on their brokers instead of dealing with issues as they arise. As an extreme example, after noticing your data center is in fire, you clear your stock position before calling 911. There’s a couple of key components to insider trading. First, you must be an insider. That is, loosely, anyone who has a some duty of trust. This can include public officials who are supposed to be serving the public and deciding to profit in times of crises instead of doing their job. This was not always the case. Furthermore, there is some notion of gaining information via illicit means also makes you an insider. The other is trading on material non-public information. “Valuable information” is only half the equation. For this, I’m going to use Matt Levine’s (I think that’s where I got it) example of how grey it can get. If a CEO harasses you, you are perfectly free to take out a massive short before suing the company. If the CEO harasses an employee, depending on the seniority and location of the crime, it could and could not be considered insider trading. Anyway, this is why we have the courts.
paulpauper 6y ago
He should have just done the twitter imposter bitcoin giveaway thing. Make $27-50/k in a single day completely undetected, no SEC getting involved. one guy made $500k. Anything having to do with insider trading is going to be full of feds, no matter how small the $ is or how accurate or inaccurate the tips are. One of the worst ways to make money, either trading from insider info or selling it. Same for the dark web, which has probably more feds than actual users. Smart internet criminals stay away from onion sites.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  This feels like a great time to mention that insider trading is perfectly legal for Congress and is insanely profitable for them.
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    Insider Trading is legally defined as registered company insiders trading or selling insider information for profit. It makes no sense to say that a congressman is "insider trading" because they are given a report on the outbreak of disease in China. There is no such thing as "insider trading" for geopolitical or macroeconomic events.
    - ALittleLight 6y ago
      If you think about "insider trading" in the sense of trading on "material non-public information" then it makes sense to say that congresspeople are legally insider trading. If I hear from a friend at X that company X is about to Y and trade off that, that's insider trading. Right? If a congressman heard in closed testimony that a bad thing is about to happen to X and trades off that...
      - Consultant32452 6y ago
        Congress gets a lot of info first. For example, some got caught making trades after they got briefed on covid, before the info was public. They know who's about to win big contacts in their district. They know who is about to be affected be legislation that was snuck into the budget last minute without debate.
koheripbal 6y ago
> insider trading activity on the dark web peaked a few years ago, and fizzled out after 2018... Perpetrators have likely migrated to more secure encrypted channels instead. Does this mean they are no longer using TOR, or they are just operating a more low-key onion site? Are there even indexes of tor sites?
- jki275 6y ago
  I read the other day that DuckDuckGo indexes tor sites.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  dark.fail
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    ...but this must only have the very top popular sites. It doesn't seem like it would have listed the site in the article.
    - colinmhayes 6y ago
      The entire point of those sites is they're invite only. Of course they're not indexed.
ckdarby 6y ago
You don't even need them to sell them to you. It is possible to get information that isn't even public just by interviewing at a company. I've done interviews where companies have told me their revenue growth, their next year plan with very specific partnerships and the technical challenges around achieving it, and I've had employees during the interview straight up explain how the company optimized their R&D to maximize their tax avoidance.

144 points by leephillips 6y ago

xt00 6y ago

TLDR: the guy was selling tips on the “dark web” in 2017 about stocks going up or down totaling 27k in Bitcoin. Sounds like he was caught when he purchased some personal info of people and used that info to open new trading accounts.

RedShift1 6y ago
So the charge should include identity theft?
- minitoar 6y ago
  "Officer, I didn't know these were stolen identities when I purchased them"

rtpg 6y ago

> A criminal complaint by the Justice Department details a string of investments that Jones made in the spring of 2017, mostly through an unnamed conspirator’s account, based on phony insider info provided by the undercover fed. That summer, the relationship would flip: Jones told the undercover agent on July 25 what an unnamed company's earnings would be, investing $5,000 on his behalf. Two days later, the numbers came out. They were identical. You know what? I'm getting a bit tired of things that smell an awful lot like entrapment. Way too many things where you have a law enforcement official seemingly start an interaction, and the "actual crime" only happening later in the sequencing. I'm not going to shed too many tears at people getting arrested for like... fake insider trading or whatever. But there's a lot of stories of people getting put away for really nasty stuff where the details make it _extremely probable_ that the undercover agent was extremely important in moving things forward. I feel like there needs to be some stronger requirements before pulling off these kinds of schemes, instead of LEO seemingly trying to fill some quota by going out hunting for people to fall into these traps.

slim 6y ago
in some countries entrapment is explicitly and strictly forbidden. like if law enforcement has an infiltrated agent, it's a risk that could void the case
- martin8412 6y ago
  And in some countries entrapment isn't even a thing. You broke the law, you'll get punished regardless if coerced by a cop or not.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    With good enough manipulation techniques you can make anyone do anything, so basically services can send LEO to groom undesirable citizen into committing a crime and then lock them up legally. It's just slightly more sophisticated than Soviets did.
    - martin8412 6y ago
      Yea, you can absolutely do that. The country I'm speaking about is Denmark. The police can also break down your door without a warrant and use anything they find against you. Them having entered illegally may have consequences for their unemployment(though it won't), but the evidence is still admissible in court.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Like where, North Korea? Did you spend even 5 minutes thinking about what you just said? Civilians rely on cops for instructions and directions. Furthermore a cop can order around civilians under threat of force. If a cop forces you to commit a crime and then jails you, they can extort you for money corruption will be through the roof. Thats what we have in Russia, the security services are superbly corrupt and regularly extort people. At least there they are breaking the law while doing so. You are suggesting we make it legal here.
josefx 6y ago

blunte 6y ago

One would assume that SpaceX engineers would be smarter than the average person, but based on the details of this story he doesn’t sound very bright at all.

4gotunameagain 6y ago
Well intellect can be broad or narrow too. source: I can be very smart and incredibly stupid too
inglor_cz 6y ago
To be a successful white collar criminal, you need to be cunning more than smart. These are very different qualities.
- dylan604 6y ago
  And have a good attorney.
polytely 6y ago
I've slowly come to the realisation that the majority of very smart people are only smart in the field they work in.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- numpad0 6y ago
  Maybe the majority of well paid people are paid for their behavioral predictability than ingenuities...
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    That's generally the case for everything in our lives, though. Part of what keeps civilization going is minimizing variance / maximizing predictability of people. In modern societies, we try to keep unpredictable people away from anything important. In the most extreme cases, we lock them up in prisons and mental hospitals. In less extreme cases, we gatekeep: for example, you have to go through a psychological evaluation to get your pilot's license, driver's license, to be allowed to own a firearm, or be employed in certain positions. Degree of such gatekeeping is usually proportional to the damage wrong behavior can cause. And then in general, we have laws and cultures and social customs that slowly grind us into shape, every day of our lives, making us ever so slightly more similar to each other with every interaction, so that we can predict each others' behaviors and cooperate effectively. (I bring this up sometimes in context of AI/ML, where I complain that modern ML is made of black boxes with unpredictable failure modes. The usual reply is, "but humans are black boxes too!". Well, they aren't completely opaque - thanks to shared hardware architecture and "theory of mind", and to the degree it's not enough, society ensures predictability is maximized.)

mylons 6y ago

what does the person’s job have anything to do with this?

vasco 6y ago
Higher click-through rate title.
- mylons 6y ago
  indeed -- also hilarious that pointing out the clickbait gets downvotes.

williesleg 6y ago

Dark is racist.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

The article is worth a read. The perpetrator was apparently doing a lot more than just insider trading on the dark web: > As far back as 2016, the account with that moniker bought names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers on the underground marketplaces that traffic in illicit online goods. He took that personal info to open banking accounts in the names of unwitting strangers, and used those accounts to make trades based on insider information he gleaned from others The claimed amount of Bitcoin he earned from these activities is low. Certainly low in the context of what a talented engineer should be earning. Either he’s hiding his actual profits, or he was simply doing this for the thrill of doing criminal things on the dark web. Strange case.

paulpauper 6y ago
it's space-x, not google. the salaries are probably not that great, especially after taking into account living expenses . $20k in net profit is a nice even for an engineer.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I assume SpaceX is like the game industry. People are overworked and underpaid because their work is their passion.
  - yaacov 6y ago
    I used to work at an aerospace startup with a lot of ex-SpaceX people. They worked 60 hrs/week and felt like they were on vacation.
- blobbers 6y ago
  It really isn't. SpaceX is in LA, and engineers that can get jobs there can easily work at google. $20K in net profit is a drop in the bucket.
Traster 6y ago
I'm not actually that surprised. There are lots of people who have decent paying jobs, but want more, and it's not as easy as saying "I earn $100k working at X, I can easily earn an extra 30k doing it freelance on the weekend". It is extraordinarily difficult to actually leverage your skills in a way that earns immediate profits - especially since your skills are often specializing in a niche that your company probably dominates. 27k for a stupid stock prediction scam seems like a decent pay off if you think your technical expertise means you have an extremely low chance of getting caught. Maybe you would be more willing to do this if you worked for a guy who repeatedly flouts SEC rules an brags about it....

syntaxing 6y ago

I’m curious if it’s $27K of 2017 Bitcoin or today’s Bitcoin. If it’s the latter it’s $385K.

moeris 6y ago
You mean former?

AzzieElbab 6y ago

There is something wrong with risk vs reward in this story. A spaceX engineer ruins his life for 27k?

danaliv 6y ago
People are motivated by way more than just money.
ufmace 6y ago
I've always believed that most crimes are committed more because of the thrill of it, the desire to feel like you got something extra illicitly because you're more clever and ruthless than everyone else, etc, than because of a rational evaluation of the financial upside.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
I wonder if he hid other profits in other crypto accounts. Or perhaps he viewed this as testing the waters and building a reputation before he scaled up. It’s possible that he just enjoyed the thrill of doing crimes and getting fun money. During the first crypto-mining boom, my friend in corporate IT caught multiple people trying to use office electricity and networks to mine Bitcoin with hidden hardware. One person even tried to hide their mining machine above the drop ceiling tiles. They couldn’t have been making much money relative to their salary, but they liked the idea of being clever enough to get free money for themselves at the expense of someone else.
paulpauper 6y ago
SpaceX is not Facebook, Goldman Sachs, or Google. There are probably no stock options or other nice perks. The salaries are probably not that great. Also, after taking into account taxes and other expenses, there is probably not that much left over, so $27k is a nice bonus.
- godelski 6y ago
  From what I know you'd get the equivalent of a junior software engineer and with no benefits. So like $90k-$120k/yr. More if you're Sr, but again, this is total. And let's be real, $30k is still a good bonus even at a $200k take home. That's an extra 15% (possibly not even taxable given the nature).

superkuh 6y ago

If the SEC is going to start caring about insider trading they should definitely take a look at what the members of the US congress did at the start of the sars-cov-2 pandemic. What this looks like to me is just the SEC with it's well known hate for SpaceX looking to hurt them any way they can.

justapassenger 6y ago
What known hate for SpaceX in SEC?
- edoceo 6y ago
  Maybe they assume SEC hated Elon, and therefore SpaceX too? Either way, citation needed
koheripbal 6y ago
Covid-19 is not a corporation, so the notion of "insider trading of non-public corporate information" makes zero sense. Insider Trading isn't some vague catch-all for non-public information. It has a specific meaning that relates to publicly held corporations.
- superkuh 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_trading_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra... Sounds like you need to catch up to date on modern law. The STOCK Act passed in 2012 makes this "insider trading".

hutzlibu 6y ago

Hypothetical question: how would it work out in the long run, if there would be no such thing as illegal "insider trading"? Because I suspect the very few things that surface up, are only a very small tip of a very big iceberg anyway, with all the elite managers/politicians interacting in pretty much closed circles, I cannot imagining it is not happening on a large scale and only some small fish like this one get caught now and then. So, how could things work out, if this would just be legal? Devastating to the economy? Much more manipulation of the stock market? Or even less, as people are more aware of it? Also, I cannot imagine myself not doing it, if I would have valuable information, I also do not really understand it all, when it would be considered insider trading and when not - but I can imagine this is the case for many people. The term seems just not clear defined to me, so maybe it is then doing more bad than good?

paulpauper 6y ago
Probably the majority of tips do not yield much profit. The problem takes cares of itself in that as the information becomes more public, the market adjusts accordingly.
hervature 6y ago
I don’t think that people are concerned about the trades but rather the perverse incentives it creates in the long term. Incentivizes bribes for officials on classified committees, it encourages employees to be more active in trading versus actually helping the company, investing would be pointless as the price would be set by insiders. By definition, any trade against an insider would be bad. It’s tough to predict the effects on the economy but I think it’s reasonable to say these behaviors are suboptimal for an economy. It’s a valid question because even Nobel laureates in economics have advocated for removing insider trader laws. However, my opinion is that academics are short sighted by their assumptions of the world. Namely, they assume that the agents would still try to maximize the well being of the company. No model is sufficiently sophisticated to take into account what happens when people get on their brokers instead of dealing with issues as they arise. As an extreme example, after noticing your data center is in fire, you clear your stock position before calling 911. There’s a couple of key components to insider trading. First, you must be an insider. That is, loosely, anyone who has a some duty of trust. This can include public officials who are supposed to be serving the public and deciding to profit in times of crises instead of doing their job. This was not always the case. Furthermore, there is some notion of gaining information via illicit means also makes you an insider. The other is trading on material non-public information. “Valuable information” is only half the equation. For this, I’m going to use Matt Levine’s (I think that’s where I got it) example of how grey it can get. If a CEO harasses you, you are perfectly free to take out a massive short before suing the company. If the CEO harasses an employee, depending on the seniority and location of the crime, it could and could not be considered insider trading. Anyway, this is why we have the courts.

paulpauper 6y ago

He should have just done the twitter imposter bitcoin giveaway thing. Make $27-50/k in a single day completely undetected, no SEC getting involved. one guy made $500k. Anything having to do with insider trading is going to be full of feds, no matter how small the $ is or how accurate or inaccurate the tips are. One of the worst ways to make money, either trading from insider info or selling it. Same for the dark web, which has probably more feds than actual users. Smart internet criminals stay away from onion sites.

Consultant32452 6y ago
This feels like a great time to mention that insider trading is perfectly legal for Congress and is insanely profitable for them.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Insider Trading is legally defined as registered company insiders trading or selling insider information for profit. It makes no sense to say that a congressman is "insider trading" because they are given a report on the outbreak of disease in China. There is no such thing as "insider trading" for geopolitical or macroeconomic events.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    If you think about "insider trading" in the sense of trading on "material non-public information" then it makes sense to say that congresspeople are legally insider trading. If I hear from a friend at X that company X is about to Y and trade off that, that's insider trading. Right? If a congressman heard in closed testimony that a bad thing is about to happen to X and trades off that...
    - Consultant32452 6y ago
      Congress gets a lot of info first. For example, some got caught making trades after they got briefed on covid, before the info was public. They know who's about to win big contacts in their district. They know who is about to be affected be legislation that was snuck into the budget last minute without debate.

koheripbal 6y ago

> insider trading activity on the dark web peaked a few years ago, and fizzled out after 2018... Perpetrators have likely migrated to more secure encrypted channels instead. Does this mean they are no longer using TOR, or they are just operating a more low-key onion site? Are there even indexes of tor sites?

jki275 6y ago
I read the other day that DuckDuckGo indexes tor sites.
colinmhayes 6y ago
dark.fail
- koheripbal 6y ago
  ...but this must only have the very top popular sites. It doesn't seem like it would have listed the site in the article.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    The entire point of those sites is they're invite only. Of course they're not indexed.

ckdarby 6y ago

You don't even need them to sell them to you. It is possible to get information that isn't even public just by interviewing at a company. I've done interviews where companies have told me their revenue growth, their next year plan with very specific partnerships and the technical challenges around achieving it, and I've had employees during the interview straight up explain how the company optimized their R&D to maximize their tax avoidance.