This is not at all in line with research on the field.

> It's why inside traders are usually unsophisticated

Insider traders who get caught are usually unsophisticated.

There is a huge survival bias here: the ones we know who did it are unsophisticated about it so were easy to catch. The ones we suspect might be doing it are sophisticated enough that there is no evidence of their wrong doing. Maybe they aren't doing it, or maybe they are just good at doing it.

One of the ways hedge funds do, or used to, do is this strategy: trade a ticker very regularly (every other day, or thrice a week), then get the insider info, make the profit in that week. Then buy and sell. A month later, move on to another ticker.

I mean, for the people in this case it seemed like that they communicated that they relied on the database access in writing somewhere that was the issue.

Surely if they, by (supposed) conjecture, figured that the company might do better if people are more dependent on phone calls in lockdown (a reasonable assumption), and there was no evidence to the contrary, how from a technical basis would it look any different from someone simply going "oh yeah my company looks like it's gonna do great, I'd recommend getting some shares"?

I wonder if this investigation would have had teeth if it had relied on coffee shop conversations as opposed to digital media.