> The big issue with all of these is that it’s very difficult to participate in the stock market anonymously. The SEC has all sorts of monitoring in place to catch more common forms of insider trading and fraud and you can guarantee that they would conduct a long, thorough investigation into a hypothetical hack-based market fraud. Unlike Bitcoin transactions, wire transfers and stock purchases can be reversed after the fact, and the exposure and risk go way up when you’re actually working with US dollars.
But this is divorced from reality. In reality you'd be one of thousands of people holding HTZ calls or TSLA puts in your Robinhood account. You could make a huge payday and be indistinguishable from the crowd. With the crypto scam, one person will eventually have to turn this BTC into fiat. With market manipulation, you've made thousands of retail investors indistinguishable from yourself rich. Which one sounds like a better idea?
> you'd be one of thousands of people holding HTZ calls or TSLA puts in your Robinhood account
Former options market maker. We regularly got incredibly detailed data requests from regulators following corporate actions. Everyone who made money got scrutiny. Anyone who made money who wasn't similarly profitable before is almost automatically punted to their broker's compliance department, who will put in several hours of investigative work by default.
One of the most consistent knowledge gaps between professional and amateur traders, I've found, is the underestimation of how advanced and pervasive insider trading / market manipulation surveillance is.
Thus it's easy to distinguish the guy that made a single perfect call from the crowd of imperfect one. The only solution for them would be to lose as much as much as everyone else from WSB... at least they wouldn't have to ever pay tax again right?!
> Anyone who made money who wasn't similarly profitable before
WSB is one offs and gets investigate. Other market players have historical data showing they are not one hit wonders. Like someone who hits 5/17 is different than one who hits 1/21
It doesn’t take that many puts in Tesla to make a killing. If you bought 5 Tesla puts at 1700 and then sent out a tweet from Musk saying “I’ve contracted coronavirus and am expected to be hospitalized due to the severity of the symptoms. I am temporarily stepping down from my position as CEO until I am healthy enough to lead this company.”
The price of Tesla would plummet by 75% for at least 30 mins while the mess was sorted. If it dropped to 500, you could make 500k easily without very much risk of being detected. Then switch directions and buy calls. Easy money. Or get 5 friends to but 1 put each. Not that hard and pretty undetectable.
Sorry, but are you unaware of modern technology and conventions that allow small groups of humans to efficiently process and analyze staggering quantities of data? Do you think such tools and methodology are only available to the tech sector?
And 4,600 is just the number of employees at the SEC — there are legions of employees at the relevant institutions who work on data compliance.
This might be true if you work at a professional brokerage or hedge fund, but there's no way the SEC can investigate everyone holding a few million worth of TSLA options.
Someone who buys a few million in puts just before hacking twitter is indistinguishable from some random robinhood user who decides it's time to go all in on puts because of a wsb post.
People in this thread are seriously underestimating the competence of the authorities in dealing with financial crimes. Virtually everything people are suggesting here is something law enforcement has seen a thousand times before.
Lots of people have had the idea that the SEC/FBI/etc. can never catch them. Right up until they go to prison.
So you're saying insider trading is a well understood and highly prosecuted crime? I'd love to believe that, but I'm wildly skeptical that financial crimes (including insider trading) aren't incredibly pervasive in our society. In fact, I'd bet good money the overwhelming majority of people get away with it - of course there's no way to prove that because nobody wants to fess up to a crime they got away with.
When they're motivated to turn the eye of Sauron toward you the Feds can be very hard to evade. This can happen in a lot of ways. Whether you got a tip from a family friend or you knew what trades to make in advance of some fake rumors on Twitter (because you planted them), if you turn $5,000 into $250,000 with some perfectly timed options trades around a news event in an individual stock you will show up on their radar.
Of course, insider trading among well connected hedge fund managers and our unaccountable financial elite is indeed pervasive and goes by without being prosecuted all the time, but it's fair to assume yesterday's hackers aren't in this protected class.
>Of course, insider trading among well connected hedge fund managers and our unaccountable financial elite is indeed pervasive and goes by without being prosecuted all the time
And a lot of those non-prosecutions involve either (a) civil fines, (b) the compliance department censuring or firing the relevant employee, or (c) the Feds backing down from a fight with a big white shoe defense firm. None of that applies to these Twitter hackers.
I'd bet it's just like drink driving. A significant minority do it despite the heavy penalities it brings. I don't know about women but I'd wager between 10-25% of men drink drive semi-regularly.
Wait do you mean they bought millions of dollars worth of put options or they bought put options they then sold for millions of dollars?
Because anyone could just buy a crap load of $0.10 options marked a week out, wait a few days, then tank the stock. It would look like you got stupidly lucky, I have no clue how anyone could connect that to the twitter event directly. Especially since it’s not like you’ll be the only one that “won the lottery”.
(Tesla isn’t a great stock for doing this though because their IV is so high that the premiums are crazy expensive)
> It would look like you got stupidly lucky, I have no clue how anyone could connect that to the twitter event directly
The more standard deviations you go into profitability, especially over one trade, the more likely you'll be to get the stink-eye.
From that point, if someone raises a flag, it's just a matter of seeing whether they've been implicated in anything else. It's why departments that seemingly have no reason to have intel access are hooked into classified networks - precisely for this kind of data sharing.
Have you met r/wallstreetbets? While this certainly wouldn't be true for most people, many "day traders" make exactly these kinds of option plays that are in many cases literally just luck. There's many thriving communities around public market information before it's seen by the "mainstream".
For these people buying $10,000 out of the money contracts on a random ticker is completely normal and still legal. So tipping somebody like that off would certainly hard to correlate.
Does your account have a history of making those sorts of trades? That's a time-consuming and costly thing to fake.
Is your position outsized relative to other punters in the OTM weeklies market? Most people don't bet the farm on one big lottery trade because the risk of ruin is too great.
Will there really be that many people who time things as well as you do and haul in a bonanza payout as though they had perfect foresight? A lot won't even be watching the market for the 5 or 10 minutes your rumor moves the stock, and of those who are, a lot of them will hang on for moar gainz.
Right, purchase something like 200-300k worth of OTM options with low enough IV, tank the stock, cash out for 2-3mil. A 10x increase isn't all that crazy and and this trade is indistinguishable from someone that just likes to gamble on short-term options. Pay your taxes and brag to your friends about how you should start a hedge fund.
Just doing that would be suspicious. Establishing a record of doing similar things for months to a year before the hack and THEN doing it, and continuing to do so for other stocks for a while after... well, then there'd be a LOT more plausible deniability.
r/wallstreetbets calls these (rather unfortunately) "fd" options.
Basically you can use not that much money to buy unlikely to be profitable options and make an actual crapload of money - and it would look identical to just being lucky.
The thing is 90% of people don't trade options themselves, and 99% of people don't do random fd plays. If you tipped off someone from WSB then they'd likely get away with it - that's what they do. Tip off a family member who has never traded options before, well....
You still need capital. This could have been executed by some bored teenager who had nothing better to do on summer break (and likely has no access to capital or loans).
Time is also a factor here. It's possible the hackers here were afraid their insider would chicken out. If they were afraid of that, they don't have time to setup a realistic looking brokerage account, transfer money and do some trading to make it all look good. That type of setup would take weeks or even months. If you sign up and the first thing you do is go all in on TSLA puts shortly before this happened you're gonna be on a list of suspects.
Also, didn't most of these tweets happen after the US markets close or just before? If the market had overnight to digest what had happened before trading opened the next day, the markets wouldn't move on information that had already been determined to be false.
(This is assuming that the hackers did not have control of the time window in which they had elevated access.)
> "In reality you'd be one of thousands of people holding HTZ calls or TSLA puts in your Robinhood account."
Yes, but of those people, a lot of them probably have a history of buying TSLA puts because they are generally bearish on the stock. Or a history of buying calls on HTZ. And they've lost a lot of money in the past over this, because TSLA keeps going up and HTZ keeps going down.
In other words, I can look at all buyers of HTZ and TSLA stocks and most likely eliminate those with histories of buying puts or calls on these stocks.
So now I have a smaller pool of people who suddenly bought HTZ or TSLA puts/calls. Of those, I can probably eliminate anyone with small positions. This isn't worth risking for a profit of a few thousand dollars. Sure I can get a few friends together to invest from their accounts, but the more people i involve, the more i risk. Plus, i can't just do family members or friends who live nearby (unless i'm in a major city), because it'll look strange if a group of people who are related or live close to each other are running the same trades at the same time.
So now they have whittled it down quite a bit. So i bring in the FBI and I start investigating my much smaller list and I target it towards people with computer savviness. It's can probably eliminate accountants and many others who most likely don't have skills to hack twitter. So it's a smaller group of people and the chances of getting caught are no longer so small (not to say it's impossible to get away with it though).
I’m not honestly 100% sure of the situation right now, but things like hertz catch on with more first-time-sucker money than you might think. I mean your benchmark is people with tsla shenanigans, which is relatively recent. With larger betting sports out or curtailed I’m just not sure there isn’t a big enough sea to hide out in.
The window of opportunity for a hack like this is extraordinarily small. The market would have caught on to the hack and reverted back to normal pricing within minutes. Anyone capitalizing on it would have had to be waiting with their finger on the trade button.
It's not comparable to something like the Hertz thing which drags on for weeks or the TSLA run-up which has been going on for months. Imagine filtering for trades that happen within a specific 120-second window. Then filter by people who have atypically large volume during that window. It's not a long list.
Anonymizing BTC is a lot easier than hiding from the SEC. There are that many people holding massive amounts of short-term TSLA options (enough to make >$500k on a single day movement) that the SEC can't look at each of them.
I highly doubt that the SEC wouldn't put the required resources into this. After all, this would've caused tens of millions in damages, rather than the mediocre 100k$.
Also, you could filter for new traders and traders overly invested in TSLA. Giving the rather mediocre execution (i.e. single Bitcoin address), I doubt the attacker had a lot of time and capital upfront to hide in these masses.
Lastly, stock market transactions can be paused and are reversible - there's a good chance of a circuit breaker hitting or a reversal happening with that blatant market manipulation.
> the SEC wouldn't put the required resources into this
Keep in mind that a lot of the SEC's enforcement breadth comes from brokers' compliance departments. Any time anyone makes an unusual profit around corporate actions, the SEC basically requires a thorough investigation by the broker's compliance staff.
Also, getting away with an event like that hurts confidence in the stock market as a whole. It's not not purely about immediate damages to people in the market, it's also about how willing people are to participate in the future. A fraction of a percent of less people participating or slowing activity likely amount to many multiples of the damages from this event.
The SEC would be extremely motivated to find these people to make an example of them so others think twice in the future.
When Musk posted a tweet 'joking' about taking Tesla private, which was utterly trivial to investigate, the SEC only managed to deliver a slap on the wrist.
Not sure I agree they'd have investigated thousands of people.
>When Musk posted a tweet 'joking' about taking Tesla private, which was utterly trivial to investigate, the SEC only managed to deliver a slap on the wrist.
Because prosecuting Elon Musk requires going up against top tier defense lawyers and proving things like "Musk tweeted this with the intention of impacting his stock's value" or something.
With hackers, you can use the financial stuff to target the hackers, and then either (a) prove the computer crimes or (b) use the computer crimes and the surrounding stock sales to prove intent. You also don't have to go up against a legal defense better funded than some militaries.
Musk is in one class of people, people who for the most part are completely beyond consequences for things like financial crimes, fraud, or even causing mass death (as in the case of the Sacklers and the opioid crisis).
You and I and yesterday's Twitter hacker are not in this class.
The SEC can look at each of them.
Compliance and suspicious trading activity mechanisms put in place by financial actors are very sophisticate.
Analyze millions of trades and make reports out of it is not a big deal. I wouldn't be surprised if SEC is already analyzing trades related to stocks impacted by this hack.
I got the impression that the author doesn't quite know the volume of people holding ~100k in TSLA options that could easily be 5x that with a well-crafted tweet.
Given that he said "buy the stock" and "short the stock", options leverage may be the missing puzzle piece for the author.
> I got the impression that the author doesn't quite know the volume of people holding ~100k in TSLA options that could easily be 5x that with a well-crafted tweet.
When communications are hacked, the market typical figures it out in a matter of minutes. Anyone wishing to capitalize on a Twitter hack would have to have perfect timing to exit their trade.
If someone was trading options of a similar volume all day every day before and after the hack, they might be able to blend in. However, once you filter down on the number of people who caught windfalls in the narrow window of time between the hack and when the market reversed and then filter further for people who invested atypically large amounts on that particular trade, it's not as short of a list as you suggest.
Could you set up a standing sell order at some price break, though? You'd have plausible deniability if you'd had it for a while and it just happens to get automatically exercised during a market panic.
But timing is essential when taking advantage of an event like this. Lots of people are trading TSLA but few are taking positions immediately before and getting out immediately after this event, as would be required to make a consistent profit from it. And unless you have an extensive history of similar risky trades (which would probably cost a lot of money to produce by itself) your data is going to stand out like a sore thumb given that timing, even among the sea of TSLA traders.
You, as the attacker, don't have to do it immediately before either. You could make your trades, wait a week, then do the scam and plausibly say you sold when the stock jumped.
This isn't really true. Especially with the volatility in the market and TSLA specifically right now, you would be taking a huge risk holding a position like that for a week. Natural moves in the stock could easily be much larger than the move your hack causes. You could even be margin called before the hack happens.
Bizarrely, a lot. Just a couple weeks ago Hertz was the most traded stock on the NYSE and is still up there with incredibly high volume. People in this thread are really underestimating how easy it would be blend into the crowd of millions of traders.
As of today, Hertz trading volume is around 5 million, while Tesla volume is around 13 million.
Tons of people would cash out their options immediately after a major event like this. And you don't have to get in immediately before. You can buy a week or even a month ahead of time and make a profit.
I still think the OP is underestimating the risk of getting caught though.
To make money on a short, you aren't selling. You're the one buying back what you've already sold, just a lower price and pocketing the difference as profit. You stand out in the middle of a sell-off.
The time between something being posted on twitter significant enough to move the market and the market finding out that thing is not true would be small enough that the number of people who had been able to take advantage of such a price movement would be extremely small—and your trade timing would need to be perfect as well, because your cash out would need to occur prior to an event you cannot control which is it becoming apparent that the posts had been hacks or at the very least untrue. You should plan to move very quickly. Remember there are many alternative means of communication.
- Any head of state is communicating directly with the press at all times through their comms department and/or they themselves commanding the focus of the press.
- Any specific company targeted, as soon as the movement in their valuation occurred, would be able to blast out the truth via PR Newswire that the specific claims were untrue and the result of a hack.
I think in this case since the correction would occur so quickly the number of trades executed made by retail would be pretty easy to sift through, and you’d undergo heavy scrutiny, even if you had an established trading history that explained your position taking.
A retail investor would be very easy to catch, basically. On something like this, I’d imagine enforcement would be a federal priority. The data available to law enforcement on matters like this is voluminous and it would only be a matter of time. Lack of enforcement is usually just a resource constraint or low prioritization. You’d have to have a much more complex plan than just taking and exiting a market position.
The only conceptual framework I can fit the idea of getting away with hacking twitter accounts to move the market and successfully exiting would be an institution with billions of positions moving fluidly in a predetermined way to align with the information seeded by the twitter posts for a short period of time. But why would anyone do that right now when all the investment banks have close to record revenue? Just 5 months ago, investment banks were in a rough spot. Now they are raking in this market recovery with little effort. I don’t know why you’d expose yourself to prison for a one time gain that would be limited because the institution needs to it make it obvious this occurred so you cannot extract maximum return.
You're making a couple implicit assumptions, here, though, such as:
1. The attacker has enough capital to load up on HTZ calls or TSLA puts.
2. The attacker has been planning this for a while.
3. The attacker is a US citizen
If any of those is not true, it changes the risk/reward considerably.
The money one is easy. Even if you get a bunch of call options for free, and if you manage to temporarily push TSLA down 10% (unlikely), then you still need $900,000 in working capital in order to exercise enough of those options to be able to dump them later for a $100,000 gain.
#2 and #3 adjust the actual risk of the operation. #2 because shoving the money around quickly gives a clearer signal for the SEC to pick up on, and #3 because triggering a whole bunch of extra KYC red tape risks getting even more hounds on your trail.
BTC does have to be turned into fiat. But I can only assume, based on how rarely people who conduct ransomware scams and the like seem to get caught, that bitcoin laundering is a solved problem.
>BTC does have to be turned into fiat. But I can only assume, based on how rarely people who conduct ransomware scams and the like seem to get caught, that bitcoin laundering is a solved problem.
Furthermore, professional black hats tend to have business expenses that can be paid in bitcoin so they don't even need to convert all of it.
You can't just pay your amazon bill with it; that creates a paper trail. The feds could subpoena Amazon to find you. You can only pay other dark web denizens, and only if you trust them not to use it for something subpoena-able.
Not true, you can sell to close back into the market without exercising. This is what most options traders do.
Also you can easily get them for "free" in a manner of speaking, if you use something like a bull put spread. You sell a naked leg of the position that pays for the purchase of the other leg.
There is no citizenship requirement for owning stocks of American companies. While U.S. investment securities are regulated by U.S. law, there are no specific provisions that forbid individuals who are not citizens of the U.S. from participating in the U.S. stock market.
You need to have a local broker/bank to deal in US dollars and in US stocks. While it's easy enough in the UK or Canada, it is really challenging to do for a random individual in most countries in the world.
Not true, I can walk into most banks here in South Africa and open an account that allows me to trade on foreign stock exchanges. Minimum deposits are in the order of USD5k, and
require only local ID to open.
Doing this anonymously would be much harder, but that's not what you were suggesting.
You think the FBI and SEC couldn't get a warrant, look through 10000 people's trading activity and have a list of 100 most likely suspects within a single day?
That's severely miscalculating the number of traders (around 10 million individuals, often with multiple accounts and multiple strategies, and not counting institutions). What I'm saying is that hiding in plain sight might be very easy - just join the crowd for a week and you'll look like many beginners that have scored surprisingly.
Do you trade? There are many ways to bet against a stock without actually selling it short. Shorting a stock is not even that capital efficient, and is capped at 100% return.
Sell a call spread, buy a put spread, do a diagonal calendar...
You'd be surprised. The SEC has largely been captured by the industry it regulates. Most employees there are junior level, looking to get hired into Wall Street.
There are certainly some strong employees as well, but they have only so much time.
> The SEC has largely been captured by the industry it regulates.
An objection that, while true, doesn't impact "will they go after Bitcoin scammers" much. If anything, it's precisely the sort of thing they'd prefer to do over fighting with industry.
Even very average positions could yield millions, especially a series of them. Imagine a "manager" of a MLM doing this with their team of sheeps. There are many teams like that.
I think the problem is you would need to use a previously active account to pull it off. If you get this hack today without an account history going back a ways, you're easy to find.
You think they could convict on "We looked at a thousand accounts and his was the most suspicious?"
If you don't leave evidence for a targeted inspection against you, it wouldn't help them to be able to narrow it down to "you probably did it" if they couldn't clear the "reasonable doubt" hurdle.
No, but it's enough to get a warrant for data or surveillance until they have enough evidence to build a case. They need to clear "probable cause" not "reasonable doubt."
No, I mean that you don't leave evidence for a targeted inspection against you to find. i.e. You execute the hack cleanly, the inspection against you finds nothing, and all they are left with is your suspicious trade, which is suspicious, but not prosecutable.
Before you're even under surveillance, you have to be perfect in leaving no fingerprints for XX years before/after and they only need you to screw up OPSEC once. Easy?
You just have to leave no evidence of the hack that links to you, but you have to do that anyway to get away.
There's nothing to hide after the fact. Dump the burner computer you used for the hack when you're done and never log in to the accounts, VPNs and VPSs you used again.
That you have the money is an open and legal fact, so you don't have to conceal anything really.
I know that's like a formulaic crack, but the last time I was at the DMV, I did wait like 2.5 hours ... because there were a huge number of people being served by a small number of people.
That's what efficiency looks like. Each transaction took a small amount of time, the clerks processed each one efficiently and had little downtime between them. Each clerk was maximally utilized, and the DMV was fully utilized all day.
A DMV where you could walk into at any time and a clerk was available to help you immediately would be incredibly inefficient: it would have too many clerks who were being paid to stand there not working. Convenient, yes, efficient, no.
I think it is very much a case-by-case basis, depending on a number of factors. Factors include, but are not limited to, what part of what government, purpose/mission, funding, incentives, and local culture.
Yes, one can find examples of incompetence and inefficiency if one looks, but one can find the opposite as well. I think a blanket attitude of government == inefficient incompetence is an unhelpful one, and a major part of how you get DMVs that deserve the purgatory comparison.
When Taylor Swift starts getting tweet responses to her "short Tesla!" tweet she would declare she was hacked very quickly and your plausible deniability would collapse.
You probably have to give Robinhood information about yourself for anti money laundering legislation. I don’t use them, but I had to give my birthplace and National Insurance (UK’s SSN) because of the latest round of aml law.
If that really happened, I think the SEC would have some questions for _every_ TSLA short / HTZ long that made exorbitant profit, with a special emphasis on anyone that entered recently.
Blue sheets are no joke. I got to see a glimpse of the info the SEC collects and learn a bit about how they use it. Dont underestimate the SEC on market manipulation. You would not be indistinguishable- it's a trap "novice" market manipulators fall for that makes them so easy to catch before they do really big news-worthy trades.
The FBI has some very effective ways to pick faces out of the crowd once there's real money on the line.
One of the advantages of using BTC for this attack is that as a stateless currency, fewer states are willing to dedicate resources to pursue people getting their BTC defrauded out from under them.
The FBI's history is a lot to go into in the space of a Hacker News comment thread, but to summarize the thought: yes, the long tail of crimes go unsolved, but high-profile crimes or crimes embarrassing to the state tend to get resolved because the organization has many resources to devote to such a task (especially in the digital era). For example, this was embarrassing to the government because it hit national news, and the cost of the tools put on the task of finding the woman are disproportionate to the damage to the car.
In this case, someone trying a major stock market manipulation would have drawn a lot of org resources. And given that even without those resources, it appears the dragnet may be closing in on them (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/07/whos-behind-wednesdays-e...), it would have likely been a bad call to try actual stock manipulation with their hack.
I'm not sure this works. A lot of the folks who're short on Tesla are big names with trading records who've been short on Tesla for a while. If you roll up and your first stock trade is to buy some short term put options right before the hack and then cash out immediately[1], that's going to be distinguishable and suspicious.
Any efforts to defer that (using a patsy with an established trading history, buying longer-term options, buying them earlier) cuts into your margins, and may well not work (since again, you've got to be the first one out since you know it's a momentary dip).
[1] - Remember, you know this is a momentary dip because you know the hack is going to get discovered soon, but the other investors don't know where the bottom is.
If you want to blend in with the RobinHood traders then you need to have some capital at play already and have had some success. Anyone whose first significant successful trades were yesterday would be up for scrutiny. At the point you fit that profile, risking what you have (and your freedom) for more becomes much less appealing.
Also, I suspect that if the hack had occurred during market hours, Twitter execs would have aggressively shut down the entire site. I imagine the hacks were intentionally timed to start after the markets closed to maximize the window for bitcoin payments. Twitter stayed up, so if that was the strategy, it seemed to work.
That’s the value of the internet that’s gone under leveraged by the public
Synchronize intent in one online bubble. Make it look like banal, random, distributed behavior via Robinhood transactions.
Mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa sat on the couch shouting impotently at Dan Rather.
The kids are shouting about all that behind their backs and figuring out how to leverage information technology from age 5 at a different scale than 30 years ago, to coordinate
I wonder if this falls under the category of insider trading? On one hand it's an interesting idea, convince a huge discord server to all buy a little stock. See if it moves the needle. But I can't imagine that there wouldn't be some implications from the SEC or feds if they found out the people were organizing.
Fraudsters open bank accounts in other peoples names all the time. The FBI says, if you wire money out the country, it's gone after 72 hours. I think they could do it with some effort and coordination. The main issue is that it was just a lone person not organized crime, not someone with tens of millions to spend, not someone with friends who own a hedge fund.
Feds would first filter the list of traders who have clean backgrounds and narrow it down to anyone who haven't been trading the stock for a while and they will review anyone who have withdrawn their cash quickly.
Unless you have been doing years of planning, planting clean evidences, you would stand out from the crowd.
> In reality you'd be one of thousands of people holding HTZ calls or TSLA puts in your Robinhood account. You could make a huge payday and be indistinguishable from the crowd.
For one, having known many posters on wsb personally, the number of people actually trading large positions vs the number participating in that forum is not the same.
Finally, people (apparently even the "informed" crowd here) greatly overestimate the difficulty of identifying individuals or actions in massive systems that are effectively recorded and completely surveilled, and they underestimate the resources of the feds. It's usually not that hard to whittle down to a handful of actions, and even if there are hundreds it only takes a tiny bit of taxpayer money to comb through it by hand.
> one person will eventually have to turn this BTC into fiat
Not if the perpetrator already participates in a cryptocurrency economy.
And even if the individual wants to convert to government currency, do you think that's a big hurdle in post Soviet states, or for state-sponsored attackers?
> The big issue with all of these is that it’s very difficult to participate in the stock market anonymously. The SEC has all sorts of monitoring in place to catch more common forms of insider trading and fraud and you can guarantee that they would conduct a long, thorough investigation into a hypothetical hack-based market fraud. Unlike Bitcoin transactions, wire transfers and stock purchases can be reversed after the fact, and the exposure and risk go way up when you’re actually working with US dollars.
But this is divorced from reality. In reality you'd be one of thousands of people holding HTZ calls or TSLA puts in your Robinhood account. You could make a huge payday and be indistinguishable from the crowd. With the crypto scam, one person will eventually have to turn this BTC into fiat. With market manipulation, you've made thousands of retail investors indistinguishable from yourself rich. Which one sounds like a better idea?