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.

Unfortunately, the saying "those who don't know history are destined to repeat it" has once again turned out to be quite accurate. Prosecutors alleged this week that in June 2011, several months after Sebbag was sentenced, a Long Island financial advisor named Damian Perna embarked on a similar scheme in which he obtained draft earnings reports for several public companies through a contact at an investor relations firm. Bloomberg reports that "after getting an advance copy of one earnings report, Perna sold it for $7,000 to a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent working under cover, prosecutors said."

Perna was reportedly arrested yesterday morning at his home by the FBI and charged with conspiracy to commit insider trading.

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