A pump-and-dump promoter creates a company that’s at least nominally involved in some kind of hot business—whether that’s railroads and bicycles in the 1800s or dot-com companies a century later. The business plan doesn’t matter, as long as there’s a mishmash of buzzwords in the mix. As the organizer of the South Sea Company, one of history’s first stock scams, told his associates around 1720: “The more confusion the better; People must not know what they do, which will make them the more eager to come into our measures.”
