RE: Shares on issueHi Rotten2core,
I can think of two direct examples on Hotcopper where the thin veneer of "anonymity" was peeled away.
1) A poster in 2005 posted inside information and after a complaint to ASEC (Australian Securities Exchange Commission) an investigation was launched. He was found, charged and eventually faced criminal charges. He wasn't a bad guy but he was hounded by ASEC for his post on Hotcopper.
2) A poster who took offense at anti-Israel comments by another poster took private legal action and forced an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed amount. I read all the exchanges and the guy who did the suing was an absolute a-hole but he had a brother who was lawyer and his brother did all the work for free. It didn't matter who was right or wrong, the important thing was that the guy doing the posting was forced to spend money defending himself and was worn down after many legal actions. He paid in the end.
It is easy to track down these people. Trackdog is using a PC connected to the internet. His ISP supplies an IP address to him and a table is kept of which IP address is allocated to which account at a specific point in time.
Stockhouse.com has servers which track who logged in at which time and those records are kept as a matter of law. When a party logs in their IP address (at that time) is recorded against the log-in ID.
It is simply a matter of a plaintiff getting a court order and Stockhouse would have to supply the IP address for the account name (at the time of the offending post). Truth be told, they wouldn't fight it as it is in their interests to clean this sort of stuff up, for the better of all their members.
Anyway, the IP address is easily tracked to the ISP and the ISP would be asked nicely to tell the investigators who that IP address was allocated to at that time.
The next step is a legal letter to our friend from the offended parties or the authorities (is it called the SEC in Canada?) knocking on his door.
Based on his responses to you I think he is stupid enough to keep going so I think I will particularly enjoy reading about what happens to him.