Ex-AT&T employee admits leaking Apple, RIM info
(Reuters) - A former AT&T (T.N) employee admitted on Monday to sharing company secrets such as sales numbers for Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iPhone to traders who illegally bought shares on the information. — Alnoor Ebrahim, 57 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Alnoor Ebrahim's admission is the second data point this year in a widening insider-trading arc around Apple's ecosystem: in February, an analyst was arrested and charged for leaking Apple sales projections to traders, and back in March 2011 a former Apple employee had already pleaded guilty in a separate kickback scheme. What distinguishes the Ebrahim case is the source — not Apple itself but AT&T, the carrier whose retail sales numbers for the iPhone turned out to be market-moving material.
The pickup across Phone Arena, SlashGear and Pulse2 shows how closely the enthusiast press tracks these cases, since each conviction narrows what partners and carriers can say publicly about Apple volumes before earnings.
First-order effects
- Ebrahim faces sentencing after admitting he passed AT&T's confidential iPhone sales figures to traders, and the traders who bought shares on his tips are now exposed to prosecution alongside him.
- AT&T must treat its own employee base — not just Apple's — as a leak surface for Apple-related sales data, tightening internal controls over channel numbers.
Second-order effects
- Hedge funds and expert networks buying color on Apple's supply chain will re-price carrier-sourced data as legally toxic, shifting demand toward legitimately obtainable checks like component orders and store traffic.
- Apple gains leverage in carrier negotiations, since partners now bear reputational and legal risk for mishandling iPhone volume data.
Third-order effects
- If the enforcement pattern holds, every company touching Apple's sales pipeline — carriers, suppliers, analysts — gets pulled into treating pre-earnings volume data as material nonpublic information, formalizing information walls around the iPhone cycle.
The trend: As the iPhone became the single most traded-upon product cycle in markets, employees across Apple's carrier and supplier network became targets for monetizing sales data — and prosecutors followed.