Two men charged with engaging in illegal financial trading using insider information found in corporate press releases stolen by hackers were both found guilty last Friday in a Brooklyn federal courtroom.
According to multiple news reports [1, 2], a jury convicted Pennsylvania pastor and former Morgan Stanley vice president Vitaly Korchevsky, 53, and Brooklyn-based co-defendant Vladislav Khalupsky, 48, of two counts of securities fraud, as well as conspiracy to commit wire fraud, computer intrusion and money laundering.
Korchevsky and Khalupsky are among a larger group of U.S. traders and Ukrainian hackers who have been charged in Brooklyn and New Jersey for an alleged plot to steal more than 150,000 press releases from newswire systems such as Business Wire, Marketwired and PR Newswire, before the releases were made available to the general public. Prosecutors say the defendants then used information gleaned from the releases to make savvy trading decisions, collecting millions in the process from 2010 to 2015.
