EDGAR Wrong: Ukrainians hacked SEC, stole docs for inside trading, says Uncle Sam A pair of Ukranian hackers broke into America's financial watchdog to swipe insider info for stock traders, it is claimed. Oleksandr Ieremenko, 26, and Artem Radchenko, 27, were today charged by New Jersey prosecutors, who alleged the pair committed securities fraud conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, computer fraud conspiracy …
I must say that if they only netted a touch over 4m bucks, they weren't very good at it. In the same six month period I daresay that entrenched US corporate managers have made off with vastly higher sums of investor's money.
What worries me is something else. Will Oleksandr be vanishing from Compare the Market adverts?
they weren't very good at it
It is difficult to be good at it nowdays. Conditional probabilities calculations are applied to all trades which are right before and right after a SEC controlled press release.
If Bayes says that a particular trader is likely to have used insider information that person's file ends up on the cop's desk next morning if not earlier. Other country exchanges do similar things too.
As a result, to profit from insider info you need to act weeks if not months in advance - something that cannot be done just based on stolen PR.
It would have been an interesting sting if, shortly before a date where some big companies announce their results, the SEC had gone to them and worked with them to upload doctored reports to EDGAR. Reports get stolen, buys/sells are made based on the reports, real reports come out, and the crooks take a bath.
Hilarity ensues, except for Mssrs. Ieremenko and Radchenko who now have very pissed-off customers with very long memories looking for them.
This does burn me a bit.
This is the same information government politicians are allowed to look at and make investments on, but the every day person gets racked and quartered if they see the report and then act on it.
About 2 years ago. The US Congress passed a law saying they could no longer do this or other things often considered 'insider trading'. They made a big thing about it--and praised themselves for it.
Then six months later they very VERY quietly removed the law so they could once again do this.
Don't you just love politicians?
Yep, gotta love 'em...
One prominent one is married to a stock trader and is worth >>$100 million on a salary of ~ $200k.
In fact, it's fairly well known that no one in the congress or senate in the US retires broke. Even someone representing a very poor district is living in a multimillion dollar house...and so are their relatives.
It's not a partisan thing, it's pretty much all of them, though most of the well known examples do come from the left side of the isle, I'm sure that's just because of who does the checking, we all know the media is biased towards the right, right? Geddit?
@Aodhhan: “About 2 years ago. The US Congress passed a law saying they could no longer do this or other things often considered 'insider trading'. They made a big thing about it--and praised themselves for it. Then six months later they very VERY quietly removed the law so they could once again do this.”
I recall reading somewhere that: EDGAR used to post the doc to the server and then post the URL at a later date. The hack consisted of guessing the next number in a sequence of predictable URLs. Given the thirty minute window the traders had to act, this would imply they didn't have access to the back-end.
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