Equifax officials are reportedly being investigated by the US Justice Department after selling stock before the company revealed a data breach that exposed the personal information of millions of Americans.
Bloomberg’s Tom Schoenberg and Anders Melin on Monday reported that the Justice Department was investigating whether top company officials violated insider-trading laws when they sold Equifax shares before the company disclosed the hack.
According to Bloomberg, the department is looking at sales by Equifax’s CFO, John Gamble; president of US information solutions, Joseph Loughran; and president of workforce solutions, Rodolfo Ploder. The three senior executives dumped almost $2 million worth of stock days after the company learned of the breach, Securities and Exchange Commission filings show. An emailed statement from the credit-monitoring agency said the executives “had no knowledge” of the breach beforehand.
All of the executives still owned thousands of shares of the company after the sales were completed, filings show.
Bloomberg cited "people familiar with the investigation" who asked not to be named because it was confidential.
Equifax did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the DOJ investigation.
Equifax last week reported a massive data breach, saying hackers may have accessed the personal details, including names and Social Security numbers, of more than 143 million consumers from mid-May to July. Equifax, which said it learned of the breach in late July, said credit-card numbers for about 209,000 people and certain documents for another 182,000 were also accessed.
The disclosure was swiftly met with criticism because of the delay in alerting the public to the hack as well as problems with the website Equifax set up for people to check whether their details were at risk.
The hack is also being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission and has prompted promises for inquiries in both the Senate and House of Representatives.
Equifax's stock was little changed at 10:41 a.m. ET on Monday. Shares have tumbled by nearly 35% since the news of the hack broke.
Check out the full story at Bloomberg here.
