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Twitter’s stock soared nearly 8.5 percent today after a fake news story reported the company was being acquired by Google for $31 billion.
The story, published on a website designed to mimic
Bloomberg News, was convincing enough to spread like wildfire from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, but, as the
The Verge notes, there were some glaring inaccuracies, including a typo that misspelled former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo as “Dick Costello.”
The website was reportedly registered in Panama on Friday, although the identity of the person or people behind it hasn’t been determined yet. (And, unlike
Chapo Guzman, no pics of the gloating miscreants have been leaked.)
Such scams are called pump and dumps: misinformation spreads virally while a select few offload their stock at inflated rates. Automated trading programs only compound the problem, as do sites such as PRWeb, a wire service for press releases. As
The Verge noted in 2012, the cost of uploading a press release to PRWeb at that time was $150, making mass distribution of false information relatively affordable.
In May, a similar pump and dump scheme targeted
Avon, whose stock rose almost 20 percent after a bogus press release claimed the beauty care giant had accepted an $8 billion buyout.
Twitter has not tweeted about the incident.
