As soon as I saw the wording of the SEC's press release ("SEC Charges Disney Employee and Boyfriend in Brazen Insider Trading Scheme"), I knew interesting facts were about to follow. The SEC likes to flag the really crazy cases in their press releases, sometimes right in the headline.

Remember the "clever and pernicious" securities fraud the SEC alleged against the Estonian spider hackers?

How about "Commission Settles with Motivational Speaker?"

Or the more recent, "SEC Charges Nationally Known Psychic in Multi-Million Dollar Securities Fraud?"

Anyway, the fact that the SEC went out of of its way to label the conduct alleged in today's action "brazen" seemed promising to me. And the facts alleged did not disappoint.

The SEC alleges that Walt Disney Co. employee Bonnie Jean Hoxie--who was an administrative assistant to a high-level Disney executive--and her boyfriend cooked up an extremely ill-fated scheme to sell confidential information about Disney's quarterly earnings to hedge funds. In short, these masterminds "sent anonymous letters in March 2010 to more than 20 hedge funds in the U.S. and Europe, offering to provide pre-release results of Disney's second quarter 2010 earnings in exchange for a fee."

Several hedge funds, apparently realizing immediately that they were being approached by the most hapless of wannabe criminals, alerted the SEC. The SEC then teamed up with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the FBI to set up an undercover operation in which the boyfriend allegedly offered to sell the information to FBI agents posing as investment managers, in one instance for $15,000 and in another for half the expected trading profits.

The lesson here? While fortune may favor the bold and the brazen, "stupid" trumps everything.