Ah, this comment provided needed context and sources to support the claims outlined above! Thank goodness the Internet is forever or knowledge and a sense of community like this would be pointless!

/s

Suppose you have $1000 in stocks for XYZ inc. You're also in charge for their communication channel with the public

You're told from your boss that the company got badly hacked and will cease operation immediately, please write a public statement about that.

Instead of doing that, you use that insider info to call your broker and sell all your stocks for $1000. Then you go on the computer and write that public statement. The company is out of business and the stocks are now worth $0.01. But luckily you got out before the disaster, right? No, it's insider trading and it will send you to prison.

So IMHO both will be charged. The admins should have told only under NDA, the mods should not have sold (but for all that money? Who would have just accepted that 70k dollars are gone immediately?)

Now, this shitcoin was monopoly money, but for some reason people invested thousands on it. Selling everything after getting insider info is the definition of insider trading.

Maybe no investigation will occur because it was unregulated trading of monopoly money but who knows, why risking having multiple discussions about everything happened

Insider trading consists of using non-public information to profit on a trade.

Now since shitcoins are not a regulated security, I don’t know if they fall under insider trading laws. They may, however, fall under fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud laws. If they knowingly defrauded people into paying for what they were conspiring to make a worthless asset, or sold that asset under conditions they knew to be false, I could see them being charged.