A wise person once said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” As a business ethics motivational speaker, motivational consultant and author, I absolutely know this to be true. The tactics may change, the marketing and sales angles may be different, but the frauds and scams of the unethical keep turning.
They are called “Influencers”
In the new world of social media, they are called influencers; most are famous, for being famous, but due to their large followers, they wield a great deal of digital power. Advertisers bow at their feet and followers; well, their followers follow their every word. Influencers get paid for having influence. Until, strangely, they don’t. They ply their trade, these influencers, across all social media platforms but generally speaking, Twitter, TikTok and a newer platform called Discord; where influencers can join groups and influence others.
There have always been influencers of course; athletes, politicians, celebrities and such, but in this new age, influence can be broader and “mobile.” The latest social media trends can measure themselves in hours or minutes or keystrokes. Influencers choose their media carefully, for they understand their demographic with precision and calculation.
As with most everything else, most social media influencers are relatively benign. A person famous for being famous and who became wealthy for being famous, might try to sell an audience perfume or skin cream of gym clothes. However, as with most anything else in life as well, there are the unethical who see the world in terms of us and them; with the “them” being scam artists and fraudsters. For, make no mistake, social media is ripe for fraud.
In the court system of the Southern District of Texas, eight influencers, social media experts all, have been charged with a massive stock “pump and dump” scheme. The eight influencers, each with hundreds of thousands of followers, proclaimed themselves to be geniuses at picking “penny stocks,” and to invest in those stocks to earn ungodly profits. They used social media plus a podcast to sway a huge audience in terms of the tremendous potential of the worthless stocks.
Then once the value of the worthless stocks started to rise, the influencers colluded to sell at great profits. In fact, about $114 million in profits.
Most of the “investors” were naïve and had no idea of what they were doing. However, what they did perceive was that the social media influencers, some of whom claimed to own stock trading companies were rich. Indeed, the defendants posed in front of expensive sports cars showing the world how successful their stock picking strategies had been.
Most savvy investors are not influenced by sports cars, but remember the “investors” who followed these guys were not savvy at all. They only imagined themselves buying stocks that would make them instant millionaires.
Required!
As with other scams, this penny stock investor fraud required a naïve group of people to have little or no idea of what was going on. The underlying stocks were all but worthless and had little intrinsic value. They were cheap to buy, cheap to hold, and “stories” could be created around them. The companies behind the stocks themselves were irrelevant. However, those influenced had no idea of what they were doing.
The eight defendants or influencers had the need to make money. That was their motivation and they succeeded.
How did they rationalize their behavior? I can make up all kinds of fancy excuses, but as a business ethics motivational speaker, motivational consultant and author, the easiest rationalization of all may be the best: they didn’t care.
Social media can be so depersonalized that, to them, the investors were little more than keystrokes themselves. To the fraudsters, they had no souls or personalities or humanity itself. In the end, the eight “stock-pick influencers” could all be seeing jail-time. The digital world, and the world of influence may be totally fake, but jail-time is real.
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