Joint U.S. and Israeli operations rounded up four individuals in Israel and Florida on Monday in seemingly unconnected arrests. The details, however, could possibly reveal a high-technology criminal ring operating a complex securities fraud scheme in Florida, Tel Aviv and Moscow. The arrests are widely seen to be linked with the massive data breach involving JPMorgan and other financial institutions that ocurred in 2014, which compromised 83 million household and small business accounts, Reuters reported.
Israeli police arrested Gery Shalon and Ziv Orenstein in Tel Aviv after they were indicted over a pump-and-dump scheme, a stock manipulation tactic based on the release and manipulation of stock information. Joshua Samuel Aaron, an American citizen, is the third member of the group and he remains at large, Bloomberg learned. Officials say that the three individuals are behind a multi-million stock fraud that manipulated shares in publicly traded stocks through deceptive email campaigns and prearranged stock trading, according to USA Today. They are in the process of being extradited to the U.S.
The arrest in Palm Beach, Fla. was carried out by the FBI and involved Anthony Murgio and Yuri Lebedev for their unlicensed bitcoin exchange, Coin.mx.
Authorities are still unable to collect enough evidence to arrest the culprits responsible for the JPMorgan breach, according to the New York Times. However, their investigation has led to the other activities of the suspected hackers, namely, the stock manipulation scheme and the unlicensed bitcoin exchange. Officials seem to expect that the arrests can provide new information and even cooperation from arrested individuals so that charges for the JPMorgan hacking can finally be filed. Authorities still refuse to comment on the recent arrests. Available information, however, has so far failed to link the arrested individuals with each other or how their activities are tied to the JPMorgan incident.
