Back when BlackBerry 10 and the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone launched, Detwiler Fenton made a claim about how the Z10 devices were being sent back in high numbers and in an unusual way. It seems as though the information was sold to Fenton by the former chief operating officer of Connecticut company Wireless Zone known as James Dunham.
Due to the confidential sales and product information being sold in secret and causing BlackBerry’s stock price to drop by 7% in just one day, James was arrested and has been sentenced to five months in prison, five months of home confinement after his time in prison, and to top things off, he still has to pay $76,000 US.
The information has been reported thanks to someone over at Reuters :
A former wireless retail executive was sentenced to five months in prison Tuesday for selling confidential industry information to an analyst whose subsequent 2013 report on sales of BlackBerry Ltd (BB.TO)’sest smartphone sent the company’s stock price downward. James Dunham, 60, was also ordered by U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock in Boston to serve five months of home confinement after his prison term and to pay $76,000 in light of his June guilty plea to a wire fraud charge.
The sentence was confirmed by the office of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz in Boston and came in the first case spilling out of its investigations into the black market for secret corporate information that exists outside of insider trading.Dunham, a resident of Glastonbury, Connecticut, was the former chief operating officer of Wireless Zone, which operates more than 400 franchise Verizon Wireless outlets. According to prosecutors and court papers, Dunham entered a secret consulting relationship with an analyst at Boston-based financial firm Detwiler Fenton in 2010 to provide wireless industry information in exchange for $2,000 per month.
Source: Reuters.