The $30 million press releases: Breaking embargoes for fun, profit, and criminal charges

If, like I do, you subscribe to daily emails from the press release service EurekAlert!, you may have noticed this boilerplate at the top of those emails:

Please note further that anyone using embargoed information for trading purposes may be in violation of the Securities Exchange Act.

If you’ve ever wondered what that was about, an Associated Press (AP) story explains in mind-blowing detail today.

Here’s the lead of the story from the AP, about what Federal authorities called “the biggest scheme of its kind ever prosecuted, and one that demonstrated yet another way in which the financial world is vulnerable to cybercrime:”