This 15 year old kid made $800,000 pumping stocks on Yahoo Finance from his bedroom

Jonathan Lebed was a high school freshman in Cedar Grove New Jersey when the SEC knocked at his door in September 2000
It all started when he was 11 years old watching CNBC after school and told the Wall Street Journal it fascinated him "watching all the numbers go by on television"
At 12 his parents helped him open a brokerage account in his father's name with $8,000 in savings bonds and some birthday money
By the age 13 he was day trading penny stocks from his bedroom computer
Between August 1999 and February 2000 he ran 11 separate pump schemes on 9 different stocks while still being in high school
His setup was always the same
After school he bought between 17% and 46% of the daily trading volume of a thinly traded penny stock, which alone usually pushed the price up before he even started posting
Late at night he flooded Yahoo Finance message boards with 200 to 300 identical messages under fake names, hyping the stock as the next 1,000% gainer or "the most undervalued stock in history"
By the time the market opened he posted another 200 to 300 messages using more fake identities
Then he watched the price spike from the fake hype as retail traders rushed in chasing the breakout, while Lebed dumped his entire position into their panic buying
His smallest one day gain was $11,000 and his biggest was nearly $74,000
On Man Sang Holdings alone he bought 18,000 shares at $2 each, posted at 11:46pm calling it "the most undervalued stock in history", watched the price hit $4.69 the next morning and made a profit of $37,901 in a single trade
He pulled this off 11 times before the SEC caught him
Lebed became the first minor ever charged with stock fraud
His settlement made him give back $285,000 in profits and interest from those 11 trades but the SEC never went after the other 5 trades he made
Lebed kept around $500,000 of the $800,000 total, bought his family a $42,000 Mercedes Benz SUV, and went back to high school
A month later he went on 60 Minutes where his father defended him on national TV with one line
"They pick on a kid"
Today Jonathan Lebed is 41 years old and still trades professionally, running his own financial newsletter