Somali Pirate Exchange Lets Investors Bet on Hitting a Ransom Jackpot

Pirate Exchange Avast, give me 10,000 shares of Pirate Inc.! U.S. Navy

Forget pirate radio, how about the pirate stock exchange? Somali pirates have created a stock exchange of sorts to fund their hijacking activities, Reuters reports.

The U.S. and other nations have committed naval warships and even aerial drones to the shipping lanes around the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden, but pirates from lawless Somalia have continued to attack ships at will.

Now even landlubber Somali civilians can invest in one of 72 "maritime companies" and hope that their favorite pirate band strikes it rich with the successful ransoming of a captured ship and crew. People don't even need to invest cash – RPGs and other weapons also accepted at the main pirate lair of Haradheere.

One wealthy former pirate told Reuters that the stock exchange had won local support by making piracy into a "community activity," which may underscore the root of the problem for nations seeking to battle piracy as a symptom.

Investing in piracy might evoke moral outrage similar to that which plagued early prediction markets. DARPA attempted to set up a prediction market in 2003 for intelligence experts to bet on certain events taking place, including terrorist attacks and assassinations, but had to shut down the operation after an angry Congress slammed it as a "sick" terrorism futures market.

Related Articles

	U.S. Deploys Reaper Drones Off Somalia Just in Time for Pirate Season
	Navy Wants High-Powered Laser for Fending Off Small Boats
	Argh! Tech Fights Back

Tags

Technology, Jeremy Hsu, buccaneers, naval, navy, piracy, pirates, ppx, prediction markets, ships, somali, somalia, stock exchange

As for the pirate stock exchange, it seems like just another natural step for Somali communities that increasingly depend on illegal activities for economic subsistence. Somali pirates put a percentage of their ransom money back into their communities to pay for hospitals and public schools. Reuters quotes a woman who contributed a rocket-propelled grenade to one group of pirates and eagerly anticipates the dividends.

This suggests that all the high-powered Navy weapons or non-lethal gadgets in the world won't solve that problem -- much as we love our anti-pirate gadgets:

[via Reuters]