U.K. Trader Arrested for Alleged Role in 2010 Flash Crash
Inside the 2010 Flash Crash and Trader Arrest
U.S. authorities accused a lone trader based in a house under the flight path of London’s Heathrow Airport for intensifying the 2010 global markets shock known as the flash crash, part of an alleged pattern of cheating dating back as far as 2009.
The trader, 36-year-old Navinder Singh Sarao, was arrested in the U.K. on Tuesday, and the U.S. is seeking his extradition, the Justice Department said in a statement. He earned almost $900,000 trading futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index on May 6, 2010 -- when investors saw nearly $1 trillion of value erased from U.S. stocks in just minutes -- and a total of $40 million from 2010 to 2014 buying and selling the contracts, according to the U.S. government.