Sunday, February 11, 2007

Where have you gone Aleksey Kamardin?

The Security and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against Florida college student Aleksey Kamardin charging him with fraudulent trading activities, commonly referred to as pump-and-dump. In the complaint it states that Mr. Kamardin made about $83k. The St. Petersburg Times states Kamardin made about $15k in three hours trading St. Petersburg-based Cyber Defense Systems Inc. (CYDF). To pull this off Kamardin, with help from others hacked into online trading accounts and used these accounts to trade illegally. The money transferred into and out of many accounts in the US, Russia and Latvia.

This is not the most recent SEC investigation into pump-and-dump trading. Most recently, in December 2006, the SEC filed a complaint against the Estonian Evgeny Gashichev for activities with his own company Grand Logistic.

Kamardin has since fled (the country?) and some believe he is hiding in Russia.

So what are the online brokerage firms doing to prevent this? How are they making their client accounts more safe?

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