Any pointers on how to report them?
As requested, I’m posting the full text of the email into this post body. I hope it’s screen reader friendly:
u/USERNAME,
tl;dr – you’re invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock at the same price as institutional investors when we IPO. Details about eligibility and next steps follow. This (long, dense) email has all the info we can provide due to legal restrictions.
As you may have heard, Reddit has taken steps toward becoming a publicly traded company with the initial public filing of our registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 22, 2024. Yes, it’s happening.
And because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors.
We’re offering a Directed Share Program (“DSP”) that invites eligible users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to participate in our initial public offering (“IPO”). (Including you!) Program Requirements While being selected to pre-register is the first step, there are certain legal and regulatory requirements to participate in the DSP that are outside of Reddit’s control. Bear with us here…
To be eligible for the DSP, you must: • Be a current U.S. resident; o You will be asked to provide the DSP Administrator a valid social security or permanent resident number, along with other personal information. Reddit will not have access to this data. o Please note that U.S. residents using a VPN may face application limitations if the VPN locates them in certain non-U.S. jurisdictions. • Be at least 18 years old; • Provide your full legal name and an email address; • Not be a current or former Reddit employee (FTE). When the DSP launches (a few weeks after pre-registration ends), individuals who have been confirmed for the program will be contacted by our external DSP Administrator. You will then be asked to provide additional information securely to the DSP Administrator to confirm your eligibility. How to pre-register The number of people who can participate in the DSP is limited; we will offer this opportunity to as many redditors as we are able to accommodate. If capacity is reached before the deadline, you will be added to the waitlist. Based on demand, we may also limit the number of shares available.
If you are interested in being part of Reddit’s DSP, please go to https://reddit.com/dsp on desktop to complete the pre-registration form. If you are one of the confirmed participants, we will follow up with an email with more details in the coming weeks. You can also refer to the Frequently Asked Questions for more information. Due to regulatory restrictions (yeah… we know…) we are not able to respond to further inquiries or questions.
Pre-registering does not guarantee that you will be invited or able to participate in the DSP; it also does not obligate you to purchase shares.
As with any investment opportunity, you should make an individual decision based on your own personal circumstances and risk tolerance. Therefore, we urge you to review the preliminary prospectus, when available, before deciding whether to invest in Reddit.
The deadline for pre-registering for the DSP is March 5, 2024. If capacity is reached before the deadline, you will be added to the waitlist. What happens next? While there won’t be a confirmation email immediately after you pre-register, everyone who pre-registers will receive an email in the coming weeks from “[email protected]”, telling them whether they can proceed with the next steps for the DSP.
This is an automated message (beep, boop, beep) and does not receive replies. Please refer to the FAQ for more information. Per our lawyercats, we are not able to respond to further inquiries or questions. Prospectus and Important Disclosures The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. When available, a copy of the preliminary prospectus related to the offering may be obtained from: Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, New York, New York 10014, or email: [email protected]; Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, New York 10282, telephone: 1-866-471-2526, facsimile: 212-902-9316, or email: [email protected]; J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Attention:c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, telephone: 1-866-803-9204, or email: [email protected]; and BofA Securities, Inc., NC1-022-02-25, 201 North Tryon Street, Charlotte, North Carolina 28255-0001, Attention: Prospectus Department, telephone: 1-800-294-1322, or email: [email protected].
A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This notification shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
No offer to buy the securities can be accepted and no part of the purchase price can be received until the registration statement has become effective, and any such offer may be withdrawn or revoked, without obligation or commitment of any kind, at any time prior to the notice of its acceptance given after the effective date. An indication of interest in response to this notification will involve no obligation or commitment of any kind.
You are receiving this email because a Reddit account, USERNAME, is registered to this email address. 548 Market St., #16093, San Francisco, CA 94104–5401
I had a high karma account that they permabanned. I imagine they probably want to send me an invite, but I never gave them my email.
oh shit me too i think lol
They’re getting desperate to find bag holders.
it’s getting more obvious they are going to pull the rug, admittedly I haven’t followed too much on the situation or on reddit at all since I stopped using reddit almost a decade ago. the site really went to shit didn’t it. I just grab my popcorn when new updates pop up these days, all reddit is for me now is an end result from a google search about a problem.
They don’t have to. There is no “pump” phase, we are already in the “dump” phase and Reddit is just dumping their stock (or gonna be when they IPO).
exit liquidity
Youre telling me, they sent me TWO invitations for two of my accounts. One of which I retired years ago because the username was kinda insensitive. Its been inactive for years, yet apparently it has enough karma for them to message me about it.
Tells you about how much karma you have to be an investor
You should be very VERY vocal about how your account, insensitive name, was asked to own part of Reddit and how willing you are to do that, in order to make sure that the world knows that reddit is owned in part by insensitive name…
I think it’s more than that.
The price for these shares is probably not cheap for the individual, but won’t raise a ton of money internally in the grand scheme of things. At least, that’s how it works for employee options and phantom stock. The disparity here is due it’s utility as a retention mechanism. The idea is that, if invested, you’re less likely to jump ship until after IPO. With options and phantom stock, they typically have a “vestment period”, so you have to wait before you can get your money back out.
In this case, Reddit knows it needs its moderators and power users, but can’t afford to employ those people. So we get this weird middle-ground where they entice people to stick around, but they’re still not employees. As a bonus to Reddit Inc., these “investors” will provide ballast for the IPO, because I’m betting this stuff has a vestment period that extends well past the IPO date. Seeing this all on a balance sheet will make other investors feel a lot better about buying or even holding shares when the IPO kicks off.
What I really don’t like about this is that they mention the “DSP” and define it, but are coy about what the actual investment instrument is. What kind of shares are these? What is the price per share?
Now, what is the 3x Bear Reddit ETN?
They once sent me an email, about their new privacy conditions on my deleted account too. If you live in EU I’d recommend forwarding this message and the confirmation of your account being deletes to your local data authorities. It’s pretty easy to file a compliant
it say’s “be US resident”. Why do they believe your a US resident? Maybe using vpn when signing up huh.
I’ve never used a VPN, and from numerous posts, many of them in my native, non-english language, it would be easy to derive that I’m not an American citizen. I’ve even stated that fact in a number of posts.
I still got an invitation. I reported it as spam.
I received it as an Australian and I don’t use VPNs.
They blanket sent the IPO shit to every big account.
If only they on reddit were so smart to check such stuff before sending the email. I also got the email here in EU and I never used VPN in my life.
Same here in Canada.
I’d be curious what the “cutoff” date is for eligibility for this. It could be that they generated the list of accounts they’d be sending this offer to some time ago, and OP deleted his account after that point.
$$$
I believe it also violates California Privacy Protection laws as well
CCPA unfortunately seems to apply only for CA residents.
Very unfortunate. Hopefully federal laws will catch up
Does the GDPR have teeth against this kind of violation? Could Reddit be hit hard with violation fees?
If the user resides in Europe then yeah. This means they didn’t follow GDPR and still retain data on user(s).
It’s in the GDPR jurisdiction but Reddit accounts are anonymous AFAIK. IMO the GDPR does not protect anonymous data.
E-mail counts as user
identifying(it’s a bit more complicated) information per the GDPR, so clearly they have kept user identifying information so the GDPR applies.EDIT: as pointed out by @[email protected] and from reading recommendation wp136 provided by him in a different post, the e-mail, unless it contains the full user name is user idenfityable information - because it can be crossed with other data (not necessarilly the IP address) to identify a person - rather than identifying information. Either way, it is considered “personal data” by the GDPR, as said very explicitly in that document which gives e-mail as an example of such. The same applies to IP address (mentioned below).
Even an IP address is user identifying information per the GDPR, which is why if for example a website wants to be compliant without obtaining explicit user authorization, it needs to do things like not maintain logs with IP addresses for longer than it would be necessary to track down problems with the website or intrusion attempts.
Right, so e-mail address together with IP address would then make the e-mail that of an identifiable user under Art.4(1). So the OP needs to find out if an IP address was logged and retained in connection with the email address.
Don’t give websites your email, what a silly thing to do
Wasnt it only for us residents? Gdpr is european
I got the email in the UK. I don’t think Reddit was looking at what countries users were from when sending it.
That’s true, but if OP is European and received this Mail, it is a GDPR violation regardless of if the content is relevant or not. As far as I know, not a lawyer.
But did they have anything or selected listed that they were from Europe, I wonder? Like, I tend to bounce around on my ip address with my vpn.
Not if they provided incorrect info during signing up. Which is very likely if they received an email only US accounts have been getting.
There isn’t even an option to select the Country of residence when creating a reddit account.
Aussie here with deleted accounts getting the email.
Just checked my old empty (now) account i didnt get such an email and im european. Maybe they do a send all in steps or something and see who bites. Anyway if ppl want to file a compllaint here is a link with countries and departments to file a gdpr complaint:
You also had to be over (what appears to be) an overall karma threshold to get the invite. It wasn’t sent to all users (I have a dormant second account that did not receive this notice). I received this message about 2 days ago.
theres definitely a threshold. my account with like 100k comment karma was invited, another with like 100 didnt.
From what I was hearing the cutoff is 25K karma.
I’m on 41K comment + 21K post and I got it
Huh, my account was over 100k and I never received an email.
I’m not sure how they pick their IPO scam emails.
I had a ton of Reddit accounts. Only my oldest one from like 14 years ago got the special email.
I got this email in the UK guessing they are just Feering it at every account with a verified email against it
Reddit may not track that, which isn’t a defense against GDPR violations.
On purpose GDPR violation is 4% of global yearly revenue fine for the company, which in reddit’s case would be 32M USD.
Still I assume OP has not actually done “forget me” request for reddit, just deleted the account. Delete is not same thing, as requesting to destroying all identifiable data of you.
GDPR doesn’t care were company is located, if you handle European citizens data, you must comply.
Delete is not same thing, as requesting to destroying all identifiable data of you.
This is what I don’t get. How are Reddit accounts not pseudo/anonymous? Back when I had an account (~5+ years ago at latest) they had nothing personally identifiable on me, in which case there are no GDPR rights to speak of. Even if I were to make an Art.17 request and go above and beyond by supplying a copy of my ID card with the request, Reddit would have no way to even verify that my ID is associated to the acct.
Email and nickname are considered identifiable data by gdpr, but that’s it. If they remove those, it is enough.
That would not surprise me
I’m in Europe and have gotten this message too through Reddit.
I haven’t used my reddit account the API change, beyond maybe 3 or 4 comments. I got an invite. How the fuck was I one of their top 35k most active users? Seems like their site isnt nearly as active as they’re claiming
I too got an email and haven’t posted at all since the API change.
If I really was in the top 35k before that, then at least I know quitting Reddit made some kind of dent in their content.
deleted by creator
Did you post a lot? Do you have email notifications turned on?
My old account has… a lot (six digits worth), of comment karma. But I think I posted a grand total of three times in the last ten years or so. I also have notifications turned off. So, no IPO notification for me.
Karma was a relevant factor. I guess if yoi had a good amount of karma it may have contributed to it.
I got the email, also… And like you, I’ve not used reddit since the api BS. I’ve not logged in, commented or anything since just before sync stopped working.
It’s based in Karma. Since I had over 200k I was invited in the first group even though I hadn’t logged in since the change.
Yeah I just got an invite as well and I haven’t logged in since the protest that brought the first wave of us here. So karma has to be a deciding factor, I had over 100k I think so that would be the only reason I got an invite.
100k is the threshold for the second round of invitations.
They must be into round 4, I have never been a mod.
It’s either/or. I’ve never been one, but since I had over 200k Karma I was in round 1.
ah i thought it was based on activity (though Reddit wrongly likes to correlate the two)
People should express interest, and go through whatever steps just short of actually buying
I have 40k karma on an 12 year old account and was invited. Obviously not buying that sit tho
Same. 13 year account with 42,000 karma. Have not been on since the API change. Never a mod, never part of anything special, just a regular user in every way.
There are a couple other factors. Were you a mod? Did you ever participate in one of reddit’s community programs like the Helper Program or Mod Council?
The 3 criteria are MVP status, which is based on participation in certain programs, Karma, or Mod Actions.
Just chiming in, 34k karma (only 4 post karma) and haven’t posted for 9 months. Never a mod. I also got the IPO offer. Think I was gifted gold one time.
When companies get desperate they start flagrantly breaking the law.
They’ll communicate through “[email protected]”. The mark of professionals…
It cheeses my beans so goram much that they took a perfectly good web site and made it terrible so they could sell it to “the public”, notionally the same people who were using the site!!!
I can only conclude that this is some kind of scam and actually most of the thing is going to end up owned by deliberately nebulous “institutional investors” and not the community members who constitute and deserve ownership of the community. Or even the people at Reddit Inc. who did the work of making the thing.
DAE socialism?
I can only conclude that this is some kind of scam
That depends on your framing.
Is it a legitimate attempt to sell shares? Absolutely. Completely legal, disregarding OP’s claim of a GDPR violation. There might be wiggle-room to suggest this is some flavor of price manipulation, but I’m not a lawyer or SEC investigator. In order to IPO, there’s a compliance framework that makes this functionally identical to any other IPO on the market.
Are some people who buy this IPO going to be left holding the bag? In a round-about “we’re all playing the same game, but also not” way, yes. For an instant, people will be holding shares in Reddit at the IPO price, and speculation on value will drive that up on the back of the IPO itself. It might plummet later the same day, it may not. But what is going to really burn people is when the primary shareholders “cash out” and sell a huge chunk of that stock. That usually has the effect of signaling that the company isn’t worth what it was anymore. It’s a gamble where the house can destroy your bid before you can manage to pawn your chips off onto the next guy.
From a spectator standpoint, where this may get interesting is where Reddit IPO intersects with r/wallstreetbets.
Edit: dividends are also a thing, but I never hear about that outside of what mutual funds and 401ks are up to. As someone who has no idea how Reddit does or can actually make money, I’m going to guess that’s not going to be a benefit of being a long-term shareholder.
