Is GameStop Trader Roaring Kitty Actually Back—Or Are We Being Punked?

After years of silence, the apparent return online this week of meme stock influencer Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, has sent stocks and crypto assets affiliated with the streamer’s past exploits soaring—creating millions of dollars in profit for lucky traders out of thin air. 

But is Roaring Kitty actually back? 

So far, only Gill’s Twitter account has reactivated since Sunday, posting scores of movie clips re-subtitled with finance-related captions—vintage Roaring Kitty. Before this week, the account had not posted since 2021, the same year that Gill became a global sensation for architecting the Reddit-fueled short squeeze of GameStop stock (GME). 

Roaring Kitty’s Twitter account has not, however, posted any recents photos or videos of Gill himself, who once regularly filmed himself talking about meme stocks for hours at a time. 

The influencer’s YouTube and Reddit accounts, once staples of his non-stop posting operation, also remain dormant. They have also not seen any activity since 2021. 

Decrypt reached out to Gill via multiple channels, but did not receive a response.

Despite the lack of clarity surrounding Gill’s apparent resurfacing, tweets from the Roaring Kitty Twitter account have sparked a stock market and crypto phenomenon. GME stock nearly quadrupled in value within a period of two days, before falling back to earth this morning. AMC, another popular meme stock, followed roughly the same trajectory. 

A Solana meme coin called GME, meanwhile, surged to all-time highs yesterday on the development, before slipping today. Those moves have collectively generated several billions of dollars worth of value. 

But the lack of verification surrounding Roaring Kitty’s return has also created opportunities for confusion. Shl0ms, a digital artist who has previously incorporated misinformation in their works, posted an image on Monday purporting to reveal that they purchased Roaring Kitty’s Twitter account from the influencer in late April. 

Some Twitter users appeared to take the post seriously; others played it off as a meta joke, which it almost certainly is. After all, the pseudonymous artist famously “hoaxed the world” earlier this year, convincing large swaths of the internet that Google was set to kill off its Gmail service.

But the fact that Keith Gill hasn’t actually uttered a single word in public in three years, nor reactivated any of his social media accounts other than Twitter, leaves room for doubt—and room for pranksters to have a little fun.

When Decrypt asked Shl0ms whether they actually control the Roaring Kitty Twitter account, or is pretending to in order to generate meta commentary, as they’ve done before, the artist replied: “Both.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward