Mounir Gad of Los Gatos sent a federal judge fake reference letters in hopes of getting a lenient sentence in a securities fraud case.

Sivannarayana Barama’s trades based on confidential information obtained ahead of four different Palo Alto Networks earnings announcements at times resulted in profits of more than five times the amount he invested.

Gene Levoff,  senior director of corporate law at Apple until he was fired in late 2018, was charged in 2019 with using inside information about Apple’s financial results to trade stock before its public release. 

Bills in Congress are aimed at the California senator and others in Congress who have had strangely good timing when it comes to stock investments.

 Mounir Gad, 34, of San Jose, was charged with a friend, Nathan Guido, 38, also of San Jose, in separate criminal and civil cases involving insider trading, and agreed to pay SEC fines.

The joint enforcement actions by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department involved a high school biology teacher, a gambling debt, a group of friends, WhatsApp messages and two Silicon Valley tech companies.