Nine people are facing federal insider-trading charges that claim they accessed unreleased corporate news releases on earnings, mergers and acquisitions, and other information that was used to illegally trade before the news was made public.
The New Jersey office of the U.S. attorney filed charges against traders Pavel Dubovoy, Arkadiy Dubovoy and Igor Dubovoy, and Ivan Turchynov and Oleksandr Ieremenko, a pair that federal authorities said were computer hackers.
Charges were filed in New York by the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, against traders Vitaly Korchevsky, Vladislav Khalupsky, Leonid Momotok and Alexander Garkusha.
Federal authorities said the nine made more than $30 million in illegal profit from the scheme that began in 2010. They said the group stole about 150,000 confidential news releases from the servers of Business Wire, Marketwired and PR Newswire, then traded ahead of more than 800 stolen news releases before their public release.
“The defendants were a well-organized group that allegedly robbed the newswire companies and their clients and cheated the securities markets and the investing public by engaging in an unprecedented hacking and trading scheme,” said Paul J. Fishman, U.S. attorney for New Jersey, in a Justice Department news release.
Separately, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit charging the nine federal defendants along with 23 others with profiting from stolen non-public information. The SEC in a news release claimed the scheme garnered more than $100 million in illegal profits.
None of the news release distributors was charged.