San Francisco (AFP)
The US Financial Markets Authority (SEC) filed a complaint Wednesday against five people, including three former Netflix employees, accused of insider trading that reportedly earned them $ 3 million in all.
According to the SEC, the three ex-engineers of the streaming platform provided their associates with confidential data on subscriber growth between 2016 and 2019.
"We accuse an employee of Netflix and his close partners of having set up a system (...) to take advantage of high-value information, obtained illegally," said Erin Schneider, director of the antenna. of the SEC's San Francisco, in a statement.
The regulator explains that the group used encrypted messaging to avoid being detected.
The SEC managed to build a case against the defendants thanks to "sophisticated analytical tools which make it possible to detect, undo and stop pernicious processes involving multiple informants and traders", underlined Joseph Sansone, director of the division of the charged SEC. of that kind of abuse.
According to the SEC complaint, Sung Mo "Jay" Jun, a Netflix employee in 2016 and 2017, was at the heart of the matter.
He was passing information on to his brother, Joon Mo Jun, and a friend, Junwoo Chon, who were using it on the stock market before the Californian company's earnings announcements.
When Sung Mo Jun left Netflix in 2017, he reportedly obtained similar data from another employee, Ayden Lee.
Another former colleague, Jae Hyeon Bae, reportedly provided him with subscriber growth figures before they were officially released by the group in July 2019.
The SEC specifies that four of the five people accused have reached an agreement with the courts, with potential fines.
If they do so again, the agreement will be nullified and they would be liable to prosecution.
© 2021 AFP