I thought it had been pretty well-established in the Bonnie Hoxie/Yonni Sebbag case discussed here in January 2011 that selling stolen, pre-release earnings report information about a company was a foolish, “Go Directly to Jail”-type of offense. You may recall Hoxie, an administrative assistant to a high-level Disney executive, and her “laughable,” “harebrained,” “crazy” and “stupid,” plan to sell confidential information about Disney’s quarterly earnings to hedge funds. One of the 20 hedge funds she and her boyfriend Sebbag sent letters to promptly alerted the authorities, which set up an undercover operation that ended with Sebbag offering to sell the information to an undercover FBI agent for $15,000. Hoxie and Sebbag were convicted and sentenced to 10 and 27 months in prison, respectively.
