The former chief information officer of a division at Equifax has been charged with insider trading stemming from stock sales he made following a massive data breach, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Byung J. “BJay” Pak, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta, has filed criminal charges against Jun Ying, who was in line to be the Atlanta-based credit bureau’s next global chief information officer when the Atlanta-based company was hacked last year, the SEC announced Wednesday.
Ying, who was indicted on the criminal charges Tuesday, will be arraigned later this week before U.S. Magistrate Judge Linda T. Walker.
The SEC accuses Ying of capitalizing on confidential company information to cash in his stock options in advance of Equifax’s public announcement of a massive data breach. Equifax has said the hack potentially compromised personal and financial data of an estimated 148 million consumers.
Equifax discovered the hack in July 2017 but did not notify the public until September.
The SEC complaint claims Ying exercised all of his vested stock options and sold the shares for nearly $1 million prior to public disclosure of the hack. In doing so, Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses, the SEC said.
“Ying used confidential information to conclude that his company had suffered a massive data breach, and he dumped his stock before the news went public,” said Richard R. Best, director of the SEC’s Atlanta Regional Office. ”Corporate insiders who learn inside information, including information about material cyber intrusions, cannot betray shareholders for their own financial benefit.”