Outrageous Insider Trading Busts We Still Can't Get Over

Who doesn't want the inside scoop? Whether it's juicy gossip about our neighbors, the magic words to say to our boss come bonus time, or the secret ingredient in our favorite restaurant's special sauce, everybody wants in on the inside line. But while it's human nature to snare (and spill) secrets, the act holds its fair share of consequences. Unless you're a Wall Street luminary accused of insider trading. Then, things just get notoriously difficult to prosecute.

Insider trading consists of a public company's "insiders" (or those close to them) using non-public material information to trade stock at a profit, betraying the fiduciary responsibility they have to company shareholders. In other words, inside traders use company secrets for their own personal gain. "Material information" can include any info not known to the general public that could change a company's stock prices, including merger information, a pending investigation or litigation, or FDA denial or approval.

Insider trading is mostly illegal in most countries, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been attempting to regulate such market manipulation in some fashion since 1934. Yet the threat of federal investigation hasn't stopped some from playing the stock market by breaking the rules, or outright rigging the game. Throughout time (and especially starting in the "greed is good" 1980s), massive conspiracies, corrupt ethics, double-crosses, and absolute audacity are common bonds shared in this very incomplete list of outrageous insider trading busts we still can't get over.

Sometimes stolen material information is on actual printed material. Such is the case in this early- 2000s scandal, which encompasses two brokers getting a Merrill Lynch banker to provide insider tips on upcoming mergers, while recruiting two regular joes to work in Business Week's printing plant to steal tips hot off the press, literally. These insider traders used the stolen "Inside Wall Street" column to their advantage before the magazine hit newsstands, and the rest of the general public.

This sounds like a scam con artist Slippin' Jimmy would've cooked up on "Better Call Saul", but is instead the work of Goldman Sachs employees Eugene Plotkin and David Pajčin, the latter who also deployed his exotic dancer girlfriend to gather intel from her finance-world clients. According to the SEC, the Merrill Lynch scheme netted Plotkin, Pajčin, and their ring $6.4 million in ill-gotten gains, while the Business Week project netted only $345,000, proving crime might pay — but not always well.

Pajčin was arrested in 2005 for his crimes, caught after the SEC learned his aunt had turned a $2 million dollar profit trading Reebok stock, two days before a merger was announced, as reported by The New York Times. Pajčin ratted out Plotkin and his co-conspirators, pleaded guilty, and fled the United States on probation in 2008. The SEC ordered him to pay $27.8 million in fees; however, Pajčin remains at large, possibly making more schemes come true.

Christopher Hill and Lukas Kamay are the subject of the corporate crime podcast "The Sure Thing," as well as Australia's biggest insider trading case to date. In the mid-aughts, Hill and Kamay were former university friends, both in their early 20s, and starting to make a name for themselves in their respective fields. Kamay was a foreign exchange trader at the National Australia Bank, while Hill was an analyst for the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The pair hatched a plan to use Hill's intel to positively affect Kamay's trades on the less-supervised foreign exchange market. Their initial plan was to keep the project low-key, but Kamay got greedy and supersized the plan.

Per The Australian Financial Review, Kamay and Hill agreed to open one secret account to house their gains of under $200,000. Instead, before their plan kicked off, Kamay opened a second (and third) secret account for his own "earnings." He played his insider trades by Hill's rules, filling the first account with only $200,000 — and his own accounts with millions.

Downfall came after Kamay and Hill's stockbroker discovered their connection, and a four-month police sting culminated in an arrest and lengthy sentencing after Kamay was filmed using Hill's intel to make a million-dollar trade in the bathroom. Investigators revealed Kamay even named a folder of his transactions "Wolf of Wall Street," after the 2013 film about Jordan Belfort's rapid rise (and fall) in the world of junk bonds.