The internet was taken by storm, and Twitter’s stock saw a rare positive jump, all on the back of, what has now been confirmed, to be a fake acquisition story.
Earlier yesterday, a story originating from a fake Bloomberg LP website, which closely resembled the financial data provider’s current News website, stated that Twitter had been made an acquisition offer, for as much as $31 Billion by an interested buyer.
The story however, has now been confirmed to be fake, by both Twitter and a spokesperson from Bloomberg. Cyber-sec experts have been put in charge to identify the origins of this website, and are evaluating the whole issue.
However, as is the case with some smallest to biggest cyber crimes, it may actually take several months or even an year or two, to actually identify the website’s designers/developers and put them to jail. In fact, Reuters reports, that cyber security experts who have been assigned the task to catch the perpetrators, are themselves of the same view.
The report appeared on a site named bloomberg.market, rather than bloomberg.com. The bloomberg.market account was suspended at mid-afternoon Tuesday. The website carrying the false report was registered on July 10, according to a domain search on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
However, even though this report was fake, Twitter enjoyed a rare good day at stock markets, considering the kind of reputation fall which Twitter has been seeing for several months.
As a result of this acquisition story, Reuters reports that Twitter options were heavily traded on Tuesday with overall options activity surging to 330,000 contracts, or more than twice normal volume, according to Trade Alert data.
Reuters further states,
A large buyer appears to have bought 12,000 near-dated call options across multiple strikes at 11:37 am ET as the fake report went out and the shares started rising. Calls betting on shares rising above $37 by Friday were bought across multiple exchanges.
