I, for one, would like to see all these “financial influencers” get heavily punished. The amount of scams and rugs and market manipulation they all pulled off in 2020-21 was unreal.
Commercials don't require disclosure because everyone knows they're a commercial. The same is not true for influencers' Instagram posts. Sometimes the scripting is ham-handed enough to be obvious, but hardly always.
The outcome is the same between murder and a self-defense homicide, too.
> Also, the fact that viewers know something is an ad doesn't change the fact that they view it as a celebrity endorsement.
That's on them, though. They have the information, it's up to them to act on it.
$400k isn't nearly enough to deter anyone in the future. That's a month's income for some of them.
If you could make $1M and pay just a month of your income if caught as fine, would you do it?
But literal actual frauds - ponzis, etc.. some high profile cases you may have memory holed. Madoff, Allen Stanford, and dozens of smaller ones that popped up week to week as the market went down. Plus all the insider trading cases that shut down SAC for a while and put a bunch of PMs in jail or to negative net worth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_W._Rothstein
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Petters
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Pendergest-Holt
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saradha_Group_financial_scan...
That one of course I think the wrong people went to jail (the guys at the bottom dumb enough to put the deeds in writing vs the guys ordering it & supervising) & it was less criminal than unethical / immoral / etc.
We have entered the part of the cycle where the frauds & charlatans get their repercussions.
Very 2008-2009esque in that regard.