You can block gift card in most payment gateways, I imagine you could do similar with Apple's system. There also is mixed evidence that Eli Lilly's stock actually went down from the tweet, given it reacted hours after the tweet and never recovered (usually fake news items effecting price will immediately correct back to the previous trading level.) Several articles I read about it bury this deep in the article, basically alluding to "we'll never actually know why the stock went down." It also becomes slightly questionable about if a quant, etc fund would not know the difference between accounts, when you really think about it...it sounds improbable.

If you're accepting payments for in-app purchases through iOS, all the billing for that happens through Apple. The app developer has no control (or knowledge) of how those payments were funded.

> You can block gift cards in most payment gateways, I imagine you could do similar with Apple's system.

What GP means is to go to a grocery store and lay out 10 American Dollars for an Apple-branded services gift card (what used to be called an iTunes Gift Card). One of these: https://www.apple.com/shop/gift-cards

You apply it to the brand new Apple ID you've made and use those virtual funds to make the in-app purchase in the Twitter app that, at the time, was the method of paying for Twitter Blue. (The purchase page even said/says, "You can only subscribe on the Twitter iOS app (for now).")

No blocking of prepaid or gift cards here; you're doing exactly what Apple wants and it's not Apple's problem that Twitter takes IAPs for a "verified" service.

Are we now sure that's really what happened?

I'd be too worried about getting charged with wire fraud or something personally.

And if you shorted Lilly at the same time, you'll probably soon be getting a visit from men in dark suits.

How would they connect you to the anonymous estonian vpn gift card purchased verified blue check account

The SEC definitely targets sudden, surprising stock moves, and looks for people who profited off them. (This is why one of Matt Levine's tongue-in-cheek 'rules for insider trading- this is not legal advice!' is never do it in short dated, out-of-the-money options!) I'm sure there are relatively sophisticated ways to exploit the market that the SEC probably won't catch (that are also more sophisticated than I understand), but now you need to have a sophisticated understanding of the market, and of cybersecurity fraud (to beat Twitters payments verification), and naturally maintain flawless opsec on both throughout. Harder and harder to do.

The FTC would look at people who recently bought short term call options against Eli Lily stock and ask them questions. Pretty much the same playbook anytime bad news causes a stock price to go down. Matt Levine notes this as a common way people get caught doing insider trading each time it comes up.

It's normally combined with recorded IM conversations along the lines of "bro, I bought some short term chickens for Lli Eily. Let's make them CLUCK with this tweet." You call them chickens, or something similar, to try and fool the FTC. This is also a surprisingly common occurrence during insider trading investigations.

"Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Apple doesn’t give away subscriber details to the service. So you don’t even need the gift card.