Look Out for Cops in the Pump and Dump

This is not legal advice or anything, but one good rule of thumb is that if you are on an internet message board looking to hire a hit man, and you end up chatting with an enthusiastic poster who seems like he might do a good job of murdering the person you want murdered, the odds that he is in fact an undercover police officer are nearly 100%. Same with lots of online crimes, though with different probabilities. Are you buying illegal drugs on a message board? You might get the drugs, or you might get arrested, hard to say. Are you buying a missile launcher on a message board? You are definitely getting arrested, nobody is selling a missile launcher on a message board, that is cops.

The percentage of people on stock pump-and-dump message boards who are cops is, I suspect, not that high, but it is rising. Here’s a good story from Australia, where the police and regulators seem to have a much stronger sense of fair play than they do in the U.S.: