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Influential GameStop Stock Surge Redditor Is Being Sued By Investors

Ewan Moore

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Influential GameStop Stock Surge Redditor Is Being Sued By Investors

Featured Image Credit: Keith Gill/YouTube/Paramount Pictures

Redditor Keith Gill/TheRoaringKitty, one of the most influential forces behind the great WallStreetBets-driven GameStop stock surge of January 2021, is being sued.

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Bloomberg reports that Gill has been hit with a lawsuit that claims he played the market to his advantage by pretending to be an amateur investor, profiting by artificially driving the up the price of stock.

As I'm sure you remember, the WallStreetBets subreddit essentially worked together to take on Wall Street, and found some success along the way. While GameStop stock is now back down to around $45, it at one point reached highs of around $400+. Several large investment firms lost millions of dollars as a result of these amateur social media tycoons... something I imagine they don't tend to take lying down.

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The proposed class-action suit was filed earlier this week in federal court in Massachusetts. It alleges that Gill was in fact a "licensed securities professional who manipulated the market to profit himself".

Through his "deceitful and manipulative conduct," the suit alleges that Gill was responsible for huge losses for companies, tricking amateur investors into purchasing GameStop stock at inflated prices for his own ends. The suit also claims that Gill defamed several large hedge funds by depicting them as "villains" who needed to be punished. This resulted in further financial losses for Melvin Capital Management, Citadel LLC, and the Robinhood app, which came under massive criticism for stepping in at one point and blocking users from buying any more GameStop shares.

The plaintiff in the case is Christian Iovin, an investor who sold $200,000 worth of call options on GameStop shares... right before stock prices rocketed from $100 to over $400. In other words, Iovin is in the same boat as all the other investors whose attempt to short-sell GameStop stock went badly wrong as a result of Reddit's efforts.

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GameStop Stonks / Credit: Google
GameStop Stonks / Credit: Google

"I did not solicit anyone to buy or sell the stock for my own profit," Gill plans to testify in his upcoming congressional hearing, at which executives from Melvin Capital Management, Citadel LLC, and the Robinhood app are also expected to appear."I did not belong to any groups trying to create movements in the stock price. I never had a financial relationship with any hedge fund. I had no information about GameStop except what was public. I did not know any people inside the company, and I never spoke to any insider."

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It's unclear how much money Gill made from his GameStop shares, or how the upcoming congressional hearing and lawsuit will go. What is certain, however, is that the outcome of these events will have wide-ranging implications for the American stock market.

Topics: gamestop, News

Ewan Moore
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