Fergie's Tech Blog

SEC: Russian Trader Used Stolen Passwords

Floyd Norris writes in The International Herald Tribune:

"Pump and dump" schemes in the stock market are an old way of making money from gullible investors, but they require persuading the investor to buy an overpriced stock.

A Russian trader, operating through an Estonian brokerage firm, found a simpler way to pump and dump stocks, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday.

The commission said the trader, Evgeny Gashichev, who was trading though an account of Grand Logistic, a Belize corporation based in Estonia, had used the Internet to steal passwords of account holders at online brokerage firms, among them E*Trade Securities, TD Ameritrade and Scottrade.

The commission said Gashichev would buy, through his own account, shares in a thinly traded company. Immediately afterward, he would use the accounts of victims to buy large amounts of the stock, driving up the price. He would then sell his shares into that demand. In some cases, he would then sell the stock short, profiting further when the price declined.

posted by Fergie @ 12/20/2006 10:32:00 AM