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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> looking into what executives knew

Since it is a criminal probe the prosecutor would have to prove beyond reasonable doubt they knew? It would seem the executives who believed they could officially refute seeing the information would have done this. Some might have contacted their lawyer maybe and asked "ok so I overheard it in the hallway as I was leaving on vacation, didn't open my email or get any calls about it, what do you think, could I slide by and sell".

In general what is the conviction rate for insider trading. It seems in general a hard thing to prove.

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Note that, as others have said, these executive only sold 4% and 17% of their holdings, respectively. It seems rather unlikely that they would risk so much for a rather negligible profit.

Regarding your question: insider trading is pretty well-policed. Conviction rate isn't really meaningful (but I'd estimate it's well above 3/4). What would be interesting is the rate of discovery, which is unfortunately impossible to know, because it's a "victimless" crime: nobody knows they've been harmed, and therefore it's impossible to find instances of insider trading without (usually) also finding the culprits.

But it's a pretty good guess that prosecution of insider trading is better today than it has ever been. Because all data is now available in digital form and can be sifted through with all sorts of advanced statistics/machine learning/etc. There's really no escape from this dragnet, because there's no way to trade without those trades showing up in the data. It's only after suspicious trades are discovered that they start following the money.

It's easy for the Fed to subpoena all emails, communications, and meetings of these people. It'll be easy to show the breach notice email sent to them, their replies, meeting agenda/attendees, and conference calls with their numbers.

In these days of electronic work environment, there are so many digital footprint one left in the trail.

I assume these are the sneaky execs who can officially claim they haven't opened that email. Individually each one thinks they probably have a chance o fooling the jury. I wonder how admissible the evidence that all 4 of them sold in the same time frame. Because individually (imagine there was only executive) each could argue that their case is just a random coincidence.

That leads into willful blindness territory, where unreasonable ignorance equates to knowledge: if there's no way you couldn't have known something without contriving a way not to know it, then you knew, in broad strokes at least, what you were trying not to know. That's how the law sees it.

Right. Sadly I think they are very likely going to get away with it.

They are almost certainly the kind of folks who planned this out and if there isn't any proof of knowledge, then there just isn't any. But it does seem inconceivable that they would have no knowledge of the event.

[IANAL] There's no trial yet, so it's about proving probable cause to go before a grand jury for an indictment.

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