LinkedIn Profile Lead To $7M Insider Trading Bust

Patrick Durkin at the AFR:

It was late on a Tuesday in September last year when one of his young client service team handed him the daily transaction report and said, “Boss, you better take a look at this.” Mr Kerr’s team had noticed one of their clients, National Australia Bank associate director Lukas Kamay, was making ­sizeable bets on the Australian dollar, minutes and sometimes seconds before the announcement of significant economic news.

Mr Kerr, the founder and owner of Pepperstone Financial, looked up Mr Kamay’s profile via his gold LinkedIn account and found he was friends with an Australian Bureau of Statistics employee, Christopher Hill, through Monash University in Melbourne.

“That was when it suddenly clicked that this guy was only trading ABS data and had a man on the inside,” Mr Kerr told Fairfax Media on Sunday.

LinkedIn: the one social network where less privacy is probably a good thing for society overall.