Did Sealed Case Get Leaked on Bloomberg News Site?

A series of Bloomberg News stories in 2018 appear to have put a handful of companies in the cross-hairs of regulators, recent legal filings indicate, and Bloomberg is enjoying unusual status in the saga.

One example is the copy of a federal lawsuit brought by the SEC that appeared on Bloomberglaw.com on Monday, July 27th. A summary of the lawsuit and the full 58-page complaint were broadcast through the Bloomberg-branded website in Google News and were quickly picked up by industry observers who pointed out that the complaint referenced an ongoing undercover investigation by law enforcement agencies.

It was an unusual reveal.

Except when deBanked tried to authenticate the documents by attempting to retrieve an original copy through the court system, we were unsuccessful because the entire case was sealed.

The case and an identical copy of the complaint, which Bloomberg had been circulating all week, were finally unsealed on Friday, July 31st. The case number was the only thing different.

The odd sequence of events suggests that Bloomberg Law may have inadvertently blown the lid on a case almost a week before anyone was supposed to know about it, including the defendants. Over the weekend, one defendant was upset that he had not been able to access the docket until the evening of July 31st. That was 4 days after the world had already gotten a glimpse of it.