SEC Charges Seven California Residents in Insider Trading Ring

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced insider trading charges against three software engineers employed at Twilio, Inc., a San Francisco-based cloud computing communications company, and four family members and friends for allegedly generating more than $1 million in collective profits by insider trading ahead of the company’s positive first quarter 2020 earnings announcement on May 6, 2020. According to the SEC’s complaint, friends Hari Sure, Lokesh Lagudu and Chotu Pulagam were software engineers at Twilio and had access to various databases relevant to the company’s reporting of revenue. As alleged, around March 2020, they learned through the databases that Twilio’s customers had increased their usage of the company’s products and services in response to health measures taken in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, and concluded in a joint chat that Twilio’s stock price would “rise for sure.” The SEC’s complaint alleges that despite receiving a company policy that prohibited them from insider trading, Sure, Lagudu and…