San Francisco: Seven Indian-origin persons have been charged by US federal authorities with insider trading in a scheme through which they made over a million dollars in illegal profits.
Hari Prasad Sure, 34, Lokesh Lagudu, 31 and Chotu Prabhu Tej Pulagam, 29, are friends and worked as software engineers at Twilio, a San Francisco-based cloud computing communications company, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday.
The complaint said Sure tipped his close friend Dileep Kumar Reddy Kamujula, 35, who successfully traded in Twilio’s options. Lagudu similarly tipped his girlfriend Sai Nekkalapudi, 30 with whom he lived, and he also tipped his former roommate and close friend Abhishek Dharmapurikar, 33. Pulagam tipped his brother Chetan Prabhu Pulagam, 31. All seven defendants live in California.
The SEC announced insider trading charges against the seven individuals for allegedly generating more than $1 million in collective profits by insider trading ahead of Twilio’s positive first quarter 2020 earnings announcement on May 6, 2020.
According to the SEC’s complaint, Sure, Lagudu and Pulagam had access to various databases relevant to Twilio’s reporting of revenue.
