A former staff of Crypto exchange company, Coinbase has allegedly been sued in a case of insider trading fraud. The man named Ishan Wahi, the company’s former Product Manager has been charged to court.
The 32-year-old has reportedly been presented to the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington.
According to details disclosed by the Department of Justice (DOJ), Ishan, who in his position where he was privy to knowledge of the potential coins that were to be listed on Coinbase, sold the information to his brother, Nikhil Wahi, and his associate Sameer Ramani.
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With the shared information, the three men acquired the potential coins billed for listing. They performed this action up to 14 times to accrue as much as $1.4 million in profit from at least June 2021 to April this year. The scheme was blown when a Twitter user flagged a massive early accumulation of a coin that Coinbase announced it plans to list in one of such trades.
The investigation eventually pointed to Ishan when he was invited to a panel by Coinbase’s director of security operations. This invitation pushed Ishan to attempt to run to India, but law enforcement apprehended him before leaving.
The DoJ and FBI are proactive in terms of bringing offenders in the digital currency ecosystem to book. Prior to this insider trading arraignment which is the first of its kind in the industry, the FBI also led the investigation into the first-ever insider trading connected with the NFT marketplace, OpenSea, back in June.