Two Bermuda-registered companies have been named in a complaint document filed by US regulators surrounding an alleged $100 million fraud.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claims that traders mostly based in the Ukraine used a string of companies around the world in a hacking scheme that broke federal securities law.

Island-based Concorde Bermuda and Jaspen Capital Partners are named in the filing. Both firms are registered at law firm Appleby’s office at Canon’s Court in Hamilton’s Victoria Street.

The Royal Gazette asked the firm if it was aware of the lawsuit and if the US authorities had asked them for assistance.

But a spokeswoman for the firm said yesterday: “Unfortunately, we wouldn’t be able to comment on that.”

The SEC filing in the US District Court in New Jersey named a total of nine people and companies around the world alleged to have been part of a group who accessed newswire services and company reports before they became public and traded on the information.

The SEC filing said Concorde Bermuda “purports to be a hedge fund established in Bermuda with its principal place of business in Kiev, Ukraine”.

It is alleged in the filing that a group hacked into at least two news agencies over a period of five years to dishonestly obtain confidential financial information then traded on exchanges based on unpublished press releases.

The SEC said that press releases were stored on the agency websites before release — leaving “a window” for fraud, which varied between minutes and days.

The SEC filing said: “From 2010 until 2014, the hacker defendants electronically intruded — hacked — without authorisation, into the newswire services’ computer systems and stole more than 100,000 press releases before they were publicly issued.”

It is alleged the hackers used a variety of ways to break into servers, including stolen usernames and passwords, malicious computer code designed to delete evidence, concealing the identity and location of the computers they used and using “back- door access modules”.

The SEC said: “The trader defendants’ trading activity mirrored the access and focus of the hacker defendants.”

The regulator asked the court: “The commission respectfully requests that this court enter an emergency, temporary and preliminary order freezing the assets of those defendants subject to the motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction, including but not limited to brokerage accounts and bank accounts, both known and unknown, requiring those defendants to repatriate amounts equal to their ill-gotten gains derived from the scheme, as alleged in the complaint, prohibiting the destruction of documents and ordering alternative means of services.”

The SEC asked the court to enter a final judgement “permanently restraining” the defendants from further violations of securities law, return gains from the scheme and to impose a civil penalty up to three times the amount of profits from the scheme.