December 27, 2016

The SEC charged three Chinese traders, Iat Hong, Bo Zheng, and Hung Chin, with hacking into the networks of two law firms, stealing confidential information pertaining to firm clients considering mergers or acquisitions, and trading on the nonpublic market-moving information to their benefit.  The SEC alleges that the defendants obtained almost $3 million in illegal profits from their scheme.  According to the SEC’s complaint, the alleged hacking incidents involved installing malware on the law firms’ networks, compromising accounts that enabled access to all email accounts at the firms, and copying and transmitting dozens of gigabytes of emails to remote internet locations.  SEC

Tagged in: Market Manipulation and Trading Violations,