Gibsonia man sentenced to year in jail for insider trading of Dick’s Sporting Goods securities
A Gibsonia man will spend more than a year in prison after being convicted of securities fraud in relation to insider trading of Dick’s Sporting Goods securities.
Frank T. Poerio Jr., 63, was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison, followed by three months of home detention and another 12 months of supervised release. He will also pay a $20,000 fine and $823,367 in restitution to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Poerio was convicted of using confidential information obtained from an employee of Dick’s Sporting Goods to make 160 trades on the New York Stock Exchange involving the company. Through these trades, Poerio gained approximately $823,000 in profit.
“Frank Poerio admitted to gaming the system by using material non-public information from a company employee to conduct well more than a hundred trades over the course of several years that resulted in nearly a million dollars in profit,” said U.S. Attorney Olshan in a July news release after Poerio pleaded guilty to the charges. “Our office is dedicated to working with our law enforcement partners and fellow agencies to protect the integrity of our public trading systems and ensure that anyone who cheats those systems to score easy profits is held accountable under the law.”
The insider trading included the purchase of individual shares and call option contracts between August 2019 and May 2021, when the insider worked in a data analytics role at the company’s corporate offices in Moon Township, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office of Western District of Pennsylvania.
Several of the incidents occurred in the days immediately preceding Dick’s release of periodic earnings statements, or “blackout” periods when Dick’s employees were prohibited from trading in the company’s securities.