Klint Finley You don't need to be a Wall Street insider to pull off insider trading anymore. Today, nine traders and hackers allegedly involved in an insider trading scheme were indicted for stealing advance copies of press releases, according to a Justice Department announcement. The group is accused of hacking into the networks of Marketwired, PR Newswire Association and Business Wire to access copies of press releases that had not yet been published. The traders then used this information, sometimes acquired just minutes before the releases were published, to make their own trades. The scheme—which lasted from February 2010 to August 2015, according to the release—appeared to be a massive success. The feds seized bank accounts holding over $6.5 million in alleged criminal proceeds, as well as $5.5 million worth of property, including a house boat, an apartment building in Georgia and a shopping center in Pennsylvania. This is the latest example of the web being used to manipulate the stock market. Earlier this year a fake news story attributed to Bloomberg briefly inflated Twitter's stock price. A similar ploy was used in a scheme to pump and dump Google sock in 2012. And in 2013 the hacker group called the Syrian Electronic Army took responsibility for hacking into the Associated Press's Twitter account to post messages that caused a stock market panic. But this may be the most elaborate of these schemes yet.
