In the United States revealed a fraudulent scheme of earning hundreds of millions of dollars on insiders with the participation of immigrants from the USSR

Photo: Bloomberg

On Tuesday, the United States was charged with fraud to a group of exchange traders, as well as related hackers. According to the prosecution, hackers broke into the servers of news agencies, extracting information about future transactions (mergers and acquisitions), Vedomosti writes . After that, these data were transferred to exchange traders who conducted transactions based on press releases and other documentation provided by hackers. According to the prosecution, the group earned about $ 100 million for the period from 2010 to 2015.

Among the accused, according to sources familiar with the case, there are immigrants from the republics of the former USSR. The main defendant in the case is Vitaly Korchevsky, who has been living in the United States since the 1990s. At the beginning of his career, he worked in several large companies, including Morgan Stanley, and in 2009 founded his own investment fund NTS Capital.

Korchevsky established an effective scheme of interaction with crackers from Russia and Ukraine. Hackers broke into networks of news agencies PRNewswire Association, Marketwired and Business Wire, extracting information about upcoming deals. According to representatives of the prosecution, for the entire time of their “work”, crackers took about 150 thousand press releases about upcoming transactions from company servers. This information, as mentioned above, was transmitted directly to Korchevsky and other brokers in the United States. Before the official announcement of a transaction, brokers conducted a series of operations with the securities of participating companies. As a result, traders received significant funds that were sent to accounts in offshore companies.

Korchevsky was arrested in his own house in Glen Mills, he is accused of fraud and money laundering. Interestingly, the fund of the accused, NTS Capital, has not shown itself since the last transfer of official documents to regulators.

Note that the current investigation is one of the largest in the financial sector. US regulators emphasize the danger of financial companies working in conjunction with hackers - since the latter can get documentation, insider information that is of value to investors. However, such cases are quite rare.

Now financial companies are trying to strengthen information protection, for which significant funds are being spent. Thus, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates, within the next couple of years, the corresponding expenditure items of the budget of companies will be increased by approximately $ 2 billion.