A former Goldman Sachs employee, Anthony Viggiano, has been charged by the U.S. SEC with insider trading. Viggiano allegedly passed insider information to friends through Xbox Chat and Signal to generate illicit gains of more than $400,000.
Summary
Goldman Sachs: former employee used Xbox Chat to engage in insider trading
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has indicted a former Goldman Sachs and Blackstone employee, Anthony Viggiano, for securities fraud.Â
Basically, the 26-year-old allegedly used Signal and Xbox Chat to share non-public details about more than a half-dozen upcoming trades to two friends while working at Wall Street firms.
This is a charge of insider trading, through a tip-off scheme that allegedly generated illicit gains of more than $400,000.
And in fact, it appears that through Viggiano’s tips, the two friends would trade and split the profits with the former analyst. One friend made $322,000 from the tips and paid Viggiano $35,000 in cash.
Authorities uncover Viggiano’s Xbox trading messages from Goldman Sachs.
Apparently, while Viggiano thought he was covering his tracks by using encrypted messaging applications such as Xbox Chat, and cash payments, authorities were instead able to uncover the whole thing.
In the details described in the SEC’s complaint about transactions conducted by associates of the former Goldman Sachs employee, there are transactions involving American International Group, Harmony Biosciences Holdings, and CDK Global.
Not only that, it is reported that Viggiano’s friends immediately executed transactions based on the former Goldman Sachs employee’s inside information and closed the positions once the transactions were announced.
The purpose of this SEC complaint is primarily to demand the return of all profits from the alleged scheme. In addition, the agency highlights how aggressively they are pursuing insider trading in legal and regulatory actions.
Even the infamous Elon Musk had been accused of insider trading
In early August, news leaked that the infamous Elon Musk was also charged with insider trading for manipulating the price of Dogecoin (DOGE) in a series of events from 2021 to the present.Â
In fact, this would be the third time the Tesla CEO has allegedly received insider trading charges.
In any case, this third charge had already been filed on 31 May in Manhattan federal court by a group of crypto investors, seeking to amend the previous $258 billion class action of June 2022.
And in fact, to add to his usual tweets of sympathy for the quintessential memecoin, Musk had also taken the liberty of temporarily changing the Dogecoin logo in place of the classic bird on Twitter.
Such a gesture was for crypto investors an insider trading move, as in just one hour DOGE had registered a +22% pump.
