Mystery Insider Traders Turned $12 Million Into $100 Million Betting on China’s Crackdown on Futu and Tiger Brokers Days Before the Announcement
According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation into one of the most brazen alleged insider trading schemes in recent memory; a series of options bets that generated over $100 million in profit ahead of a Chinese regulatory crackdown announced on May 22, 2026.
Unknown traders spent just $12 million buying 200,000 short-dated put options on Futu Holdings and Up Fintech (Tiger Brokers) in the two weeks before China’s securities regulators publicly named both firms for illegally serving mainland clients without proper licences. Their stocks collapsed on the news. The mystery traders walked away with a return exceeding 900%.
Susquehanna International Group; one of America’s largest market-makers, with $893 billion in equity positions, was the primary counterparty on those trades and lost $71.4 million. The Philadelphia-based firm filed a federal lawsuit in Manhattan naming 100 John Doe defendants and has already won a court order freezing linked brokerage accounts at Interactive Brokers, Futu, and Tiger Brokers.
Susquehanna itself draws the comparison: the Galleon Group’s Raj Rajaratnam scheme, which sent him to prison, yielded only $53 million. This is in a different league entirely.
Check out our previous coverage of financial markets and regulatory enforcement here.
