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

Photo: Bloomberg

On Tuesday, the US accused a group of exchange traders and associated hackers with fraud. According to the prosecution, hackers hacked into the servers of news agencies, extracting information about future transactions (mergers and acquisitions), writes Vedomosti. After these data were transferred to stock traders who conducted the transaction, 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.

According to sources familiar with the process, among the defendants are people from the republics of the former USSR. The main defendant in the case is Vitaly Korchevsky, who has been living in the USA 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 has established an effective scheme of interaction with hackers from Russia and Ukraine. Hackers hacked into the PRNewswire Association, Marketwired and Business Wire news networks, extracting information about upcoming deals. According to representatives of the prosecution, for all the time of their "work", hackers have taken away about 150 thousand press releases from the servers of companies about upcoming deals. This information, as mentioned above, was transmitted directly to Korchevsky and other brokers in the United States. Brokers conducted before the official announcement of a transaction a number of operations with securities of companies participating in transactions. As a result, traders received significant funds that were sent to accounts in offshore companies.
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Korchevsky was arrested in his own house in Glen Mills, accused of fraud and money laundering. Interestingly, the defendant’s fund, 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 sphere. US regulators emphasize the danger of financial companies working in conjunction with hackers - since the latter can extract documentation, an insider that has value to investors. However, such cases are quite rare.

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