Cumming Man Accused of Involvement in Hacking, Trading Schemes

A Cumming man is among a group of traders who allegedly accepted stolen confidential earnings information from hacked newswire services and used the information to make money in the stock market, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday.

Aleksandr Garkusha was named among 34 defendants involved with Ukrainian-based Jaspen Capital Partners Limited. During a five-year period, Garkusha and other traders in the U.S. and abroad received some 100,000 press releases that had not yet been made public from publicly traded companies from a pair of hackers based in Ukraine. The hackers received either a flat fee or a percentage of the profits earned through the use of the information, court documents show.

With information the public didn’t yet have access to, Garkusha and his co-defendants allegedly took some 1,400 trading positions and made approximately $100 million in illegal profits, according to the SEC.

Jaspen and its principal Andriy Supranonok settled with the SEC and have agreed to pay out $30 million in fines, the SEC said.