Code-stealing Programmer Sentenced to 97 Months in Prison
A former computer programmer has been sentenced to 97 months in prison for stealing proprietary computer code from Goldman Sachs.
Last December, a federal court found Sergey Aleynikov guilty of theft of trade secrets and interstate transportation of stolen property charges.
According to evidence presented at trial and at the sentencing hearing, Aleynikov resigned from Goldman Sachs in April 2009 as he had accepted a job offer at rival company Teza Technologies. He had been hired to develop Teza’s own version of a computer platform that would allow the firm to engage in high-frequency trading.
On his last day at Goldman Sachs, Aleynikov transferred some of the firm’s proprietary computer code for its trading platform to an outside computer server in Germany. He then encrypted the files and transferred them over the Internet, and deleted the encryption program. Aleynikov also emailed thousands of computer code files from the firm’s computers to his home computers.
In addition to the prison sentence, U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote ordered Aleynikov to serve three years of supervised release following his prison sentence. He has also been ordered to pay a $12,500 fine.
“[Aleynikov’s] conduct deserves a significant sentence because the scope of his theft was audacious—motivated solely by greed, and it was characterized by supreme disloyalty to his employer,” Cote said.
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