Twitter shares spike nearly 8% thanks to fake Bloomberg story

Twitter’s stock briefly spiked on Tuesday after a fake story said the company received a $31 billion buyout offer. The report appeared on a “Bloomberg.market” webpage virtually identical to the powerful financial news agency’s real pages at “Bloomberg.com,” and with links to other real Bloomberg reports. The report came out at about 11:35 a.m. and sent Twitter’s shares jumping from $36.90 to $38.82 in minutes. Fifteen minutes later, though, the shares fell back to near where they started.

I think this is a modern form of the pump and dump. Now people can set up a website in a day or so and publish a fake news story to be able to trade on the securities before the truth comes out.

Robert Heim, a former lawyer at the SEC

The agency itself reported that the website domain had been registered several days ago by someone in Panama. Experts say these kinds of schemes will probably persist because news spreads so fast over social media and traders have to react so quickly. Jordan Thomas, another former SEC attorney, says these kinds of schemes are usually aimed at smaller companies than Twitter because they have fewer shares, making it easier to manipulate their stocks.

Business $TWTR