SpaceX Engineer was caught selling insider information to an undercover FBI agent. A certain "MillionaireMike" was known to be a busy person as the account allegedly ran a stock tip scam that had earned him a whopping $27K in Bitcoin payments. As early as 2016, the account bought names, addresses, date of birth, and even Social Security numbers from the dark web that traffic illicit online goods.
SpaceX Engineer Sells Alleged Insider Data
MillionaireMike, or rather the 33-year-old SpaceX engineer James Roland Jones took personal information to make banking accounts of unwitting strangers and made trades based on insider information that he had gleaned from others. Eventually, he then started to sell the purported insider information but this time, to an undercover FBI agent.
James Roland pleads guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud. An official Justice Department criminal complaint details a string of investments that Jones had been making in the spring of 2017. These trades were done mostly through an unmanned conspirator's account, based on certain phony insider info that was provided by the undercover fed.
SEC Complaint on Jones
During the summer, the relationship then flipped as Jones told the undercover agent back on July 25 what the unnamed company's earnings would be like and thus investing $5,000 on his behalf. Two days later, the numbers officially came out and they were identical.
The DOJ detailed the scheme and according to the story by Wired, it was not especially unusual. The SEC complaint on Thursday, however, dives deeper into Jones' alleged activities and also represents the very first time that a particular regulator has set its sights directly on the dark web.
SEC Calls 'Scammer'
The SEC somehow paints Jones less as an inside trader but more of a scammer that was allegedly peddling bogus insider tips that were actually just based on hunches instead of actual insight.it also claims that Jones first entered the dark web insider trading world some time during the late 2016 when he stumbled upon a wiki that had listed a number of hidden marketplaces.
One of them even advertised itself as some sort of community for exchanging certain insider information about some different Publicly Traded Companies along with a description that also matched a so-called online site known as How to Beat Wall Street. The price of entry into the forum was to provide genuine insider information.
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Jones Gets Caught
Instead of providing insider information, Jones tried to guess what the upcoming earnings report would hold in order to present it as an insight. He was initially wrong, then wrong again, and finally on his third try, he was right, according to the SEC.
How to Beat Wall Street, however, does not give out lifetime membership and members need to continually prove their worth to swap tips. This was something Jones could not do. Moderators revoked his membership after three months. He was then shortly caught by an FBI undercover agent after trying to peddle fake insider tips.
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Written by Urian B.
