How does someone become an FBI informant? That's the story my guest Tom Hardin shares with me on this re-recorded episode. Tom and I originally spoke in 2019, but we thought we'd re-record the episode in 2021, to take account of subsequent events.

Tom previously spent much of his career as a hedge fund analyst. In 2009, as part of a cooperation agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, Tom assisted the U.S. government in understanding how insider trading occurred in the investment management industry. Known as “Tipper X,” Tom became one of the most prolific informants in securities fraud history, helping to build over 20 of the 80+ individual criminal cases in “Operation Perfect Hedge,” a Wall Street house cleaning campaign that morphed into the largest insider trading investigation of a generation. Since resolving his case in 2015, Tom was invited by FBI-NYC to speak to the Complex Financial Crime Unit's rookie agent class in 2016 and is now an international corporate trainer and speaker on conduct risk, compliance and behavioral ethics. He holds a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Tom can be contacted at www.tipperx.com.


Resources:

On the podcast. Tom references Napster, a peer to peer music-sharing website that launched in 1999 and was closed down in 2001. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster


You can follow Tom on Twitter at https://twitter.com/iamtipperx

He is also on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-hardin-0952324/

To see his 1-minute videos, visit his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrBkFwrpqDuTz6mXrmyTzUg