“The top prosecutor in Manhattan is seeking to indict three men for allegedly stealing valuable computer source code from an automated trading firm, according to people familiar with the matter.

“A criminal complaint filed by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in New York and seen by The Wall Street Journal alleges that Glen Cressman and Jason Vuu, who worked as traders at Flow Traders US LLC in New York, emailed themselves lines of code that contained secret algorithms at the heart of the firm’s high-frequency trading strategy.

“Mr. Vuu shared the code with Simon Lu, a college friend from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through the file-storage service Dropbox, according to the complaint, which accuses the two men of planning to use the secret software to start their own company. Mr. Lu, currently a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was studying there when he allegedly received the stolen code.”

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Read full Wall Street Journal article here