Former automated trading employees accused of stealing source code

Two traders at Flow Traders US LLC in New York emailed themselves proprietary algorithms at the heart of the firm's high-frequency trading strategy.

One of the individuals shared the code with a college friend from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through the file-storage service Dropbox, according to a criminal complaint, which alleges the pair planned to use the secret software to start their own company. The recipient, currently a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was studying there when he allegedly accepted the stolen code.

The trio, all men in their 20s, were arrested earlier in August 2013 and arraigned in state court in Manhattan. The DA's office has been investigating the case and obtaining search warrants in recent weeks.

After searching the recipient’s computers, “investigators discovered that some of the computer code allegedly stolen from Flow Traders had been manipulated, leading investigators to believe that [he] had taken steps toward launching his own high-frequency trading platform,” the Journal reports.

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