Matt Levine, Columnist

Pumping, Dumping, Hacking and Spinning

Also credit-card fees, taxes and of course bond market liquidity.

July 22, 2015 at 12:23 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

The JPMorgan hack or whatever.

Here are some news accounts reporting that some guys connected to last summer's JPMorgan computer hack got caught. Here are the federal civil and criminal securities fraud cases against three guys accused of manipulating some penny stocks in a very standard pump and dump scheme. Here is a separate federal case against two guys accused of operating an unlicensed bitcoin exchange. Supposedly these cases are all the same case. I am confused! The complaints never mention the hacks, the pump-and-dumpers do not sound like sophisticated computer masterminds, and their alleged pumping and dumping happened years before the JPMorgan hack. (The bitcoin guys seem to have processed a payment for the victim of at least one "ransomware" hack last summer, but they're not accused of any involvement in the hack and it's not connected to the JPMorgan thing.) I guess prosecutors feel good enough about the JPMorgan hacking connection to leak it to reporters, but not good enough to put it in court papers? Meh.