‘There’s no tracing Xbox 360 chat,’ claimed guy now charged with insider trading

If you’re going to do financial crimes, maybe an Xbox isn’t your best bet? That is one but hopefully not the only lesson learned by 26-year-old Anthony Viggiano, a former Goldman Sachs investment analyst who’s been indicted for insider trading, along with two of his friends.

He allegedly tipped off those friends to big financial deals using both encrypted messaging and — incredibly — a game console’s audio chat.

According to the indictment (via Kotaku), the FBI secretly recorded Viggiano admitting that he passed on illegal info, possibly via an Xbox 360, of all things:

Salamone: You have shit where you’re giving fucking information to fucking Steve [Forlano Jr.]?

VIGGIANO: Nah. Nah. Because similar to you . .. signal, or like XBOX 360 chat, there’s no tracing that. Good luck ever finding that.

Together, Viggiano, his childhood friend Christopher Salamone, and his college buddy Stephen Forlano made at least $400,000 from the insider trading scheme before they were caught, the government alleges.

It’s not clear whether the friends used an Xbox 360 specifically. For one thing, the FBI alleges that Forlano and Viggiano communicated by email and disappearing messages on Instagram, not necessarily Signal. But the government says Viggiano did use “a video game console’s audio chat” and apparently even managed to confirm the contents of that audio somehow:

Using this video game counsel audio chat, FORLANO told CC-1, in substance and in part, that ChannelAdvisor was going to be acquired and the price at which the acquisition was likely to occur.

It might have been an Xbox 360, though! The “no tracing Xbox 360 chat!” conversation allegedly occurred in June 2023, and the Xbox 360 is still hanging in there today. Microsoft has stated it will let friends connect and play multiplayer games indefinitely on the Xbox 360, “as long as the publisher still supports the online servers.”

The whole indictment’s a fun read — these guys seem pretty brazen. You can find it below.