FBI Charges 30 in Decade-Long Global Insider Trading Ring

The FBI Boston Division has unsealed charges against 30 individuals tied to a sprawling, decade-long insider trading scheme that allegedly netted tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits. The defendants include corporate attorneys and financial professionals accused of stealing M&A information from some of the country’s largest law firms.

The scheme

Charges were unsealed Wednesday against 30 defendants in connection with a large-scale, decade-long insider trading scheme that netted tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits, with defendants who include corporate attorneys and other financial professionals alleged to have stolen confidential information on nearly 30 merger and acquisition deals from several of the nation’s premier law firms, including a firm headquartered in Massachusetts.

Nineteen defendants were arrested when the indictments were unsealed and two others are considered fugitives.

How it allegedly worked

Nicolo Nourafchan and Robert Yadgarov are said to have recruited fellow lawyers to provide non-public details on mergers involving publicly traded companies in exchange for kickbacks, with the pair passing the information through traders and middlemen, and trades made ahead of nearly 30 M&A deals.

The Yale Law School-educated attorney had worked from 2013 to 2023 at Sidley Austin, Latham & Watkins and Goodwin Procter, according to an indictment, which did not name the victim firms but detailed publicly announced corporate deals they worked on.

To hide the illegal network, federal authorities said the conspirators would use burner phones, encrypted files, coded language, and in-person meetups where electronic devices were turned off, with kickbacks consisting of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. Trades were routed to overseas brokerage accounts in Russia, Israel, Panama, and Switzerland.

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The Amazon-iRobot angle

In total, the traders implicated in the scheme engaged in insider trading ahead of nearly 30 M&A deals involving public companies, such as Amazon.com’s proposal in 2022 to acquire iRobot, a deal the companies later abandoned in the face of antitrust regulator opposition; at the time, Nourafchan was employed by Goodwin Procter, which advised iRobot, and according to the indictment, he viewed confidential materials about the deal on the law firm’s document management system while on leave from the firm.

What officials said

“With today’s arrests, the FBI has dismantled a large-scale, decade-long, international organized criminal network of corporate attorneys and financial professionals who are accused of stealing and trading on material, non-public information from several of our nation’s leading law firms, including one right here in Massachusetts. Everyone charged today is accused of scoring significant profits from expected market moves and making out like bandits. That’s not merely gaming the system – it’s a federal crime,” said Ted E. Docks, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Division.

The charge of conspiracy to commit Title 18 securities fraud provides for a sentence of up to 25 years in prison, five years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss, while the charge of conspiracy to commit Title 15 securities fraud provides for up to five years in prison.

Options market and stocks to watch

Watch for renewed scrutiny on pre-announcement options activity around M&A names. A few tickers in focus:

• AMZN — directly named in the indictment via the abandoned 2022 iRobot bid; watch for any follow-on commentary on deal-leak risk.
• IRBT — the target of the cited Amazon deal; flow history around the bid period may resurface in the case record.
• GS and MS — watch large-cap M&A advisors for any read-through on compliance and document-access controls across deal pipelines.
• SPY — broader market-structure angle as regulators lean harder on suspicious pre-deal flow. See other news for the latest enforcement headlines.

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