ONE young man sitting in a forest used a laptop and a mobile phone to temporarily wipe more than $314million from the value of Nathan Tinkler’s Whitehaven Coal on Monday morning.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission is now making inquiries into the elaborate hoax, in which anti-coal campaigners issued a fake media release and impersonated a corporate affairs spokesman from ANZ Bank.

The media release said ANZ had reversed a decision to provide a $1.2billion loan to Whitehaven, of which Mr Tinkler is the main shareholder, and sparked a sudden sharemarket sell-off when it was emailed to journalists at 11.44am. The company’s price dropped about 8.8 per cent and Whitehaven was put into a trading halt.

It resumed trading on Monday afternoon, after news of the hoax spread. The stock recovered to about its original price of $3.52. ‘‘We will be speaking to the people involved,’’ ASIC said in a statement.