At the time of the announcement, the moderators of most of the subreddits involved with the community points program claimed to be unaware of the decision.
Summary: Reddit warns mods that it's ending its crypto program, before it warns the other users. What could go wrong? /s
Ah, this comment provided needed context and sources to support the claims outlined above! Thank goodness the Internet is forever or knowledge and a sense of community like this would be pointless!
What actually consitutes the crime? Hearing about it and profiting from the change or the act of telling staff about these changes or both? And if both, are both punished equally or is telling a more serious offense?
Suppose you have $1000 in stocks for XYZ inc. You're also in charge for their communication channel with the public
You're told from your boss that the company got badly hacked and will cease operation immediately, please write a public statement about that.
Instead of doing that, you use that insider info to call your broker and sell all your stocks for $1000. Then you go on the computer and write that public statement. The company is out of business and the stocks are now worth $0.01. But luckily you got out before the disaster, right? No, it's insider trading and it will send you to prison.
So IMHO both will be charged. The admins should have told only under NDA, the mods should not have sold (but for all that money? Who would have just accepted that 70k dollars are gone immediately?)
Now, this shitcoin was monopoly money, but for some reason people invested thousands on it. Selling everything after getting insider info is the definition of insider trading.
Maybe no investigation will occur because it was unregulated trading of monopoly money but who knows, why risking having multiple discussions about everything happened
Insider trading consists of using non-public information to profit on a trade.
Now since shitcoins are not a regulated security, I don’t know if they fall under insider trading laws. They may, however, fall under fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud laws. If they knowingly defrauded people into paying for what they were conspiring to make a worthless asset, or sold that asset under conditions they knew to be false, I could see them being charged.
I don't know how the laws apply to crypto but for stocks etc the law only pertains to acting on information that isn't public. Being privy to that information alone isn't a crime and is an expected outcome for lots of people working in various roles in a company. People who are routinely made aware of non-public information usually sell stocks and exercise options on a schedule well in advance because it's an affirmative defense against allegations of insider trading, and most corporations only make that kind of information available to people who sell their stocks on a schedule in order for it to not be construed as conspiracy to commit insider trading.
That very last thing I wrote, like, if some company was gonna declare bankruptcy or something, they wouldn't tell the janitor or sales, that kind of thing. Reddit apparently didn't do that and let all the mods know. Probably other laws regarding that, or maybe common sense, might be considered conspiracy tho