FBI Agent And Analyst Team Up To Extort, Defraud
from the fun-fun-fun dept
It sounds like the plot to a bad movie. A former FBI agent used confidential government information and tools while investigating fraudulent behavior to alert a so-called "analyst" of problems with certain companies. That analyst would then write bad things about those companies while (oh yeah) also extorting money from them to get him to stop writing about them. Since the companies were already being investigated by the FBI for wrongdoing, many probably felt it was better to pay up than to report the extortion attempts. The defense, by the way, on all of this, was that the FBI agent was simply trying to expose the corporate fraud he found. Of course, if that were true, wouldn't he actually do something as an FBI agent rather than leak it to someone who was extorting those companies?Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Old News, In a Way...
I read about this when they were arrested. Since this link is story about their conviction, the arrest and original articles that generated was probably 1-2 years ago (which is why I thought when I read this, "This sounds very, very familiar).
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Conflict of Interest
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