Stock manipulation schemes are nothing new. But when cybercriminals pilfer investors’ passwords and use those to artificially inflate the stock price of pubic companies — well, that’s original. And as eSecurity Planet reports, it happens to be the scheme that the Securities and Exchange Commission cracked down this week.
But while the story may differ, the details remain the same: Users’ financial details and access to their accounts is a hot commodity in the online criminal underworld, and can be put to a variety of nefarious uses.
A U.S. federal judge this week agreed to freeze the assets of BroCo Investments and its president, Valery Maltsev, after Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigators accused the firm of stealing investors’ usernames and passwords to execute unauthorized trades that affected the stock price of more than three dozen companies.
In its complaint, the SEC said the “hi-tech market manipulation scheme” took place between August 2009 and December 2009 when BroCo Investments employees or co-conspirators hacked into an unknown number of investors’ online trading accounts to purchase stocks at above-market prices.
