Michelle Leder, Columnist

Financial Twitter, Beware. The Cops Are On to You

“Alex Delarge” talked up a lot of penny stocks. It didn’t go well for investors.

October 29, 2021 at 12:30 PM UTC

Michelle Leder is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Creator of Footnoted.com, a site devoted to SEC filings, she is author of “Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company’s True Value.”

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U.S. authorities appear to be opening a new front in their efforts to battle securities fraud. The territory: financial Twitter.

Their target is @AlexDelarge6553, an allusion to the movie “Clockwork Orange” and the Twitter handle of a Maumee, Ohio-based trader named Steven Gallagher. His Twitter persona projected an image of success, posting a photo of a Tesla Model S that he claimed to have purchased with his winnings, and touting numerous thinly traded penny stocks to more than 70,000 followers.