A former pro soccer player raked in $2.7 million trading on confidential info he pilfered from his girlfriend’s work laptop, federal prosecutors in New Jersey alleged.
Justin Jennings, 27, was hit late Tuesday with securities fraud charges for allegedly misappropriating secrets on deals involving firms such as Apollo Global Management.
Jennings, who briefly played in Latvia’s second tier of pro soccer, allegedly accessed a confidential database on the woman’s computer to make well-timed trades based on info about eight companies, the feds said.
While they dated for over two years, the unnamed woman — an account executive at a top Wall Street PR firm — shared “confidential and private details about her work and personal life” including the passwords for the laptop and online services, according to the criminal complaint.
Jennings denied the allegations.
“Once the evidence is presented, we are confident that Mr. Jennings and his company will be fully vindicated,” said his attorneys Robert Stahl and Laura Gasiorwski.
While the PR firm Jennings allegedly targeted was not named, sources close to the case said it is Joele Frank, one of the biggest names on Wall Street.
“According to the charges, [Jennings] exploited a personal relationship with a now former junior employee to illegally obtain confidential information. There are no allegations against the firm or any employee, current or former. We worked closely with the relevant authorities and will continue to do so,” Joele Frank said in a statement.
The identity of the PR firm was first reported by Bloomberg.
“Perhaps they got the AI bug and decided client information should be open sourced,” a Wall Street insider who works for a rival firm joked to The Post.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a parallel civil lawsuit against Jennings and his investment firm, Vortex Strategies, for his alleged “unlawful insider trading based upon material
nonpublic information in advance of eight significant corporate disclosures.”
In the scheme, Jennings, of of Rockaway Township, would wait until his girlfriend stepped away from the screen to open confidential draft press releases and internal memos for pending announcements, prosecutors said.
He would then load up on options before the news hit, cashing out within hours of it breaking, the indictment charged.
Investigators found screenshots of draft corporate announcements tucked in his iCloud account, the SEC complaint said.
The fattest payday came in July 2023, according to the feds. After allegedly reading a client’s unreleased earnings miss, Jennings put roughly $105,000 into bets the stock would tank. The morning after it did, he sold for a $985,000 profit.
A truck-stop chain’s buyout that February had already cleared him about $859,000, prosecutors said. A takeover the next year handed him $374,550. A deal involving an electric-vehicle charging company kicked in $356,000 more, according to the feds.
Born on Long Island, the 6-foot center forward landed at FK Jūrnieks in Latvia after a tryout tour that lined him up against the country’s reigning champions.
Jennings retired in late 2021 and came home to New Jersey, drifting through property management and freelance coding before billing himself as a data-science entrepreneur, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in its civil suit.
He had never worked a day in finance, prosecutors said. But that did not prevent him from setting up his company and cutting himself checks scrawled with memos like “capital contribution” and “profit dist,” according to the feds.
If found guilty, Jennings could face up to 25 years in prison on the top charge of securities fraud.
The FBI’s Newark, NJ, office ran the investigation, and the SEC is moving to claw back Jennings’ profits, plus interest and penalties.