The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a lawsuit for fraud against a number of professional stock market participants, the list of which includes two well-known investment companies and six traders from Ukraine.

According to the lawsuit posted on the regulator's website, in particular, the list of suspects includes two Kyiv investment companies, namely Concorde Bermuda, Jaspen Capital Partners, as well as Oleksandr Yeremenko, Oleksandr Makarov, Andriy Supranonok (who owns 30% of Jaspen Capital Partners), Ivan Turchynov (all based in Kyiv), Nelia Dubova, and Vladyslav Khalupsky (both from Odesa)

According to the lawsuit, the defendants realized an international scam, hacking the servers of at least two news agencies and dishonestly obtaining confidential financial information about companies traded on exchanges from unpublished press releases. Then the attackers used the information to trade in securities and thus received about $100 million of illegal income.

In particular, during about five years Turchynov and Yeremenko have been using the information from some hacked newswires and stole more than 100,000 press releases of publicly traded companies. Many of the stolen press releases contain information on the quarterly and annual revenues of companies.

As stated in the lawsuit, Makarov (previously worked in Phoenix Capital) using this fraudulent scheme got approximately $80,000 of illegal income. He often conducted transactions at the same time in relation to the same securities and using the same IP address Concorde Bermuda used.

As for Concorde Bermuda investment company, it is stated that it was also involved in the fraudulent scheme, and as a result obtained $3.6 million of unfair profit. In addition, the company transferred money to Jaspen Capital Partners.