‘This Is Not Financial Advice’

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‘This Is Not Financial Advice’

How finfluencers prey on economic desperation.

Eleni Debo for Noema Magazine

Credits

James O’Sullivan lectures in the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork, where his work explores the intersection of technology and culture.

On a lesser-known American stock exchange called “the OTC,” a company called DarkPulse Inc. trades under the ticker symbol DPLS. In February 2022, its CEO and Chairman Dennis M. O’Leary claimed on then-Twitter that DarkPulse had the potential to become a half-trillion-dollar company within seven years. Some four years later, and at the time of writing, DarkPulse is worth $2.6 million, a very long way from half a trillion.

The curious thing is that many people believed O’Leary. Back when he was making such claims, platforms like Twitter and Reddit were teeming with DarkPulse shareholders convinced that their stake in this tiny startup would one day make them rich.

OTC securities, whose name preserves an older practice of trading directly “over-the-counter” between two parties rather than on a centralized exchange, now operate like any other stock market (the largest is run by the OTC Markets Group). Often known as “penny stocks”, though not all OTC companies are penny stocks, they are incredibly high-risk investments. Remember that scene from Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” wherein Jordan Belfort sells a hapless investor shares in Aerotyne — “a couple of brothers making radar detectors out of their garage” — by pitching it as a cutting-edge high-tech firm awaiting imminent patent approval? That, essentially, is the OTC: a market for companies held up as the next big thing, most of which amount to nothing.

These self-styled DarkPulse shareholders, aka “Zillas,” having adopted Godzilla as their mascot (presumably due to the parallels between Godzilla’s blue atomic breath and the company’s primary product, sensing technology for infrastructure monitoring), had reason to believe they were making a speculative but not unreasonable investment. O’Leary even threw lavish shareholder parties attended by celebrities like Mario Lopez and Fred Durst.

But while the company’s CEO and its loyal shareholders were celebrating the bright future being promised, the underlying financials never came close to matching such rhetoric. Scroll through any relevant social media platform, and you’ll see that many people have lost money investing in DarkPulse. In financial markets, as long as one is careful with legalities, it is apparently permissible to make extravagant promises that never materialize.

As far back as September 2017, a good five years before O’Leary’s “half a trillion dollar” claim, the company announced a newly finalized India agency agreement “valued $1B+” that, according to its own filings, never existed; a 2018 binding letter of intent with a Kazakhstan-based operation worth $24.6 million produced no revenue; a $15 million stock buyback announced in November 2021 never happened; and a special dividend consisting of shares in its subsidiary, Optilan, announced in June 2022, was never distributed. There were even accusations of charity fraud. In October 2021, DarkPulse pledged 100% of all merchandise sales from both their online store and their first annual shareholders event to K9s for Warriors, a charity that provides service dogs to military veterans suffering from trauma. The charity claims that it never received the promised donations.

This was all great material for the eagerly awaited documentary on the company and its CEO, or as O’Leary himself suggested, maybe even DarkPulse the Movie.

O’Leary has since deleted many of the relevant social media posts, though they remain documented in 2023 court filings alleging DarkPulse engaged in misleading promotional activity and repeatedly overstated its business prospects, as well as in screenshots shared across the personal accounts of many of the company’s former believers. Neither O’Leary nor anyone associated with DarkPulse has faced criminal charges, and the company remains active and continues to trade on the OTC market.

The Carnival Of FinTwit

To understand why anyone believed O’Leary’s claims, you must first understand what social media has done to financial culture over the past decade. Stock trading was once an exclusive endeavor for investment bankers and the wealthy; now, anyone with a smartphone can open a brokerage account and build a portfolio. The number of small-time “retail traders” has grown dramatically in recent years. By 2025, retail investors accounted for roughly 20% of daily U.S. stock market trading volume, more than double their share in 2010.

This trend accelerated in early 2021, when users on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets triggered a highly publicized short squeeze in GameStop’s share price. Large numbers of traders bought the stock, driving up its price and “squeezing” those...