While Equifax was deciding when to tell consumers about the massive security breach that compromised the personal data of 143 million or so Americans, three executives just happened to sell off some of their stock. As a reward for their great choice, the U.S. Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into whether they violated insider trading laws when they sold stock before the company disclosed the hack, Bloomberg reports.
Prosecutors are looking at stock sales by Equifax’s chief financial officer, John Gamble; the president of U.S. information solutions Joseph Loughran; and president of workforce solutions Rodolfo Ploder. The execs sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in early August.
Equifax claims the executives didn’t know of the breach at the time they sold the shares, but the optics of the situation are so bad that the DOJ can’t simply look the other way. Hopefully, er, justice will prevail.
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