Tag Archives: Nancy Kestenbaum

First Digital Asset Insider Trading Indictment

by Arlo Devlin Brown, Nihkil K. Gore, Gerald Hodgkins, Nancy Kestenbaum, Jeremy Newell, Michael Nonaka, Adrian J. Perry, D. Jean Veta, and Juliana Moraes Liu

A former non-fungible token (“NFT”) marketplace employee is facing prosecution by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York on one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering, in an indictment unsealed on June 1, 2022. The Department of Justice (“DOJ”) alleges that the employee perpetrated a scheme to use confidential information from his employer about which NFTs would be featured on the marketplace’s front page to commit insider trading in the featured NFTs for his personal financial gain.

According to DOJ, this is the first insider trading case involving digital assets, and it notably relies on a theory that can be applied to a wide range of digital assets, whether or not the assets are regulated as securities.

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The SEC Tweaks Its Booming Whistleblower Program

by Samantha Choe, Arlo Devlin-Brown, Steven Fagell, Gerald Hodgkins, Barbara Hoffman, Nancy Kestenbaum, David Kornblau, and Mythili Raman

Last week, a divided Securities and Exchange Commission amended its whistleblower rules, hailing the changes as adding “clarity, efficiency and transparency to its successful whistleblower program.”[1] Although the agency made a large number of changes to the program, the amendments should not have a significant overall effect on SEC whistleblower activity, which we expect to continue at a high level. Continue reading →