If you’re going to commit financial crimes, maybe an Xbox isn’t your best option? That’s one, but hopefully not the only, lesson learned by Anthony Viggiano, 26, a former Goldman Sachs investment analyst who has been charged with insider trading, along with two of his friends.
He allegedly tipped off those friends about big financial deals using encrypted messages and, incredibly, audio chat from a games console.
According the accusation (through kotaku), the FBI secretly recorded Viggiano admitting that he had passed illegal information, possibly through an Xbox 360, nothing more:
Salamone: You got some shit where you’re giving information to fucking Steve (Forlano Jr.)?
VIGGIANO: No. No. Because similar to you. .. signal, or like the XBOX 360 chat, there is no trace of that. Good luck finding that.
Together, Viggiano, his childhood friend Christopher Salamone and his college classmate Stephen Forlano made at least $400,000 from the insider trading scheme before they were discovered, the government alleges.
It’s unclear whether the friends specifically used an Xbox 360. For one thing, the FBI alleges that Forlano and Viggiano communicated via email and messages that disappeared on Instagram, not necessarily over Signal. But the government says Viggiano did uses “the audio chat of a video game console” and apparently even managed to confirm the content of that audio somehow:
Using this audio chat from the video game attorney, FORLANO told CC-1, in substance and in part, that ChannelAdvisor was being acquired and the price at which the acquisition would likely occur.
But it could have been an Xbox 360! The message “Xbox 360 chat without tracking!” The conversation supposedly occurred in June 2023, and the Xbox 360 is still there today. microsoft has declared will allow friends to connect and play multiplayer games indefinitely on the Xbox 360, “as long as the publisher continues to support online servers.”
The whole accusation makes for fun reading – these guys seem pretty brazen. You can find it below.
