Former Rochdale Securities trader arrested in fraud scheme involving Apple stock

“The FBI arrested a former trader at the Connecticut firm Rochdale Securities on Tuesday in a fraud scheme involving Apple stock, U.S. prosecutors said,” Reuters reports.

“According to a criminal complaint filed in federal court on Monday, David Miller bought Apple shares for himself ahead of the tech giant’s Oct. 25 earnings announcement, then told his employer Rochdale the trade was for a customer who would bear the risk if it lost money,” Reuters reports. “As a result, Rochdale was left unexpectedly owning over a million shares of Apple and had to sell them for a $5 million loss.”

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“Authorities say Miller worked as an institutional sales trader for Stamford-based Rochdale Securities LLC,” The Associated Press reports. “They say he executed a trade to buy 1.6 million shares of Apple Inc. stock on a day the company was scheduled to announce earnings.”

“Prosecutors say the scheme was designed so Miller would profit if the stock price rose, but it declined,” AP reports. “They say Miller falsely claimed he made a mistake in a client’s order.”

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MacDailyNews Take: Genius.

Congressmen Want The FBI To Shut Down Hamas Twitter Accounts

Twitter has moved far beyond just being a network you use to tweet about your lunch, and along with the many useful services it's a platform for, it can also be a tool for terrorism and violence. At least that's how seven House Republicans see it, and that's why they're asking the FBI to shut down Hamas-related Twitter accounts.

The request was sent to the FBI back in September, but so far the agency has taken no action, and the congressmen behind the request have been getting more vocal about it. Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), who's been leading the campaign put it this way to The Hill on Wednesday:

Allowing foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas to operate on Twitter is enabling the enemy. Failure to block access arms them with the ability to freely spread their violent propaganda and mobilize in their War on Israel. Anti-American foreign terrorist groups around the world are doing the same thing every day. The FBI and Twitter must recognize sooner rather than later that social media is a tool for the terrorists.

So far the FBI hasn't released any sort of feedback to the request. Instead, an FBI spokesperson told The Hill that the FBI is considering the request internally, and intends to respond to the letter directly. Whether or not that response will involve actually locking down any Twitter accounts is yet to be seen. [The Hill via The Verge]

Apple, FBI deny hacker claim of breach of Apple iOS device user data

“Apple Inc. and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation denied claims by hackers who said they stole information on 12 million Apple Inc. user accounts from an FBI computer,” Jordan Robertson and Adam Satariano report for Bloomberg.

“Many of the hackers' claims, posted this week in a long online missive from the group calling itself Anonymous. The FBI said in a statement yesterday that there was ‘no evidence indicating that an FBI laptop was compromised or that the FBI either sought or obtained this data,’” Robertson and Satariano report. “Apple said it didn't provide any user information to the FBI or other organizations. ‘The FBI has not requested this information from Apple, nor have we provided it to the FBI or any organization,’ said Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokeswoman.”

Robertson and Satariano report, “The hackers may have posted some legitimate users' device names and the unique identifier codes assigned to their iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, according to Sean Sullivan, a security adviser at F-Secure Corp. who examined a data file that the hackers released. It isn't known whether the hackers really have the other information they claim to have redacted from the data file, including user names, mobile phone numbers and addresses. ‘What they have released is not a very serious breach at all,’ Sullivan said in an interview. As for claims that the information came from the FBI, he said, ‘they've offered no additional corroborating evidence, they've offered nothing else — they've immediately demanded no interviews. I think they've made it up.’”

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