Arrests in stocks, Bitcoin fraud tied to JPMorgan hack: report

US and Israeli authorities arrested four men in two separate fraud schemes on Tuesday that media said were linked to last year's hack of computers at JPMorgan Chase.

The court documents in each of the cases, one an Israel-based ring running a pump and dump scheme for US-traded penny stocks, and the other an illicit US Bitcoin transfer operation, did not tie them to the theft of confidential details on millions of clients at the giant US bank.

But The New York Times, citing people briefed on the matter, said the four, and another man still at large in Israel, were involved in the hack at the bank.

In October, JPMorgan disclosed that hackers had accessed information such as names and addresses for 76 million household customers and seven million businesses in the preceding months.

The court documents in the stock scam say Joshua Samuel Aaron, Gery Shalon, and Zvi Orenstein gained millions of dollars in their operations to artificially pump up the prices of small stocks and cash in while other investors lost heavily.

In the other case, Anthony Murgio and Yuri Lebedev used a front company and a licensed credit union to hide an operation to transfer large sums of money using the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

Officials said the operation amounted to an illegal money transfer service, and also linked it to operations in which hackers took over people's computers and extorted ransom from them to free up their data.

The operation involved using bank accounts in Cyprus, Hong Kong and Eastern Europe, according to court filings.