Former Dragon Quest Developers Arrested in Japan for Illegal Insider Stock Trading

In a report recently caught by Asahi Press TV, it was stated that two former Square Enix employees were arrested under suspicion of violating Japan’s Financial Instruments and Exchange Law by insider trading of shares.

The first suspect, Taisuke Sasaki, is believed to have worked on Dragon Quest XI as a middleware manager. The second suspect, Fumiaki Suzuki, is a former Dragon Quest X event programmer. However, their exact positions were not disclosed.

The suspects are believed to have committed fraud in the trading of shares of Aiming Corporation, which is supposedly working with Square Enix on the Dragon Quest Tact mobile game. Here’s how it went down: The two developers, despite not being involved the company, were aware that Aiming Co. would publicly announce their involvement at some point.

However, that information was confidential, so they used the fact that only they knew about it and purchased approximately 47 million yen (Approximately 336 thousand US Dollars as of November 16, 2022) worth of the Aiming Corporation’s stock before it was publicly known, betting on the fact that they could resell that stock for an astronomically higher price after the fact went public. But oh the irony, it seems the duo wasn’t very successful. That just goes to show that you should NEVER kid around with confidential information, folks!

UPDATE: In a recent report by FNN Online, it was confirmed that a third suspect was arrested by the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, alongside the two people mentioned previously under the same illegal insider trading charges. Who was it? None other than Yuji Naka. He had been in possession of approximately 10,000 shares of Aiming stock which were worth approximately 2.8 million yen at the time of purchase. Investigations are still ongoing to determine if the two cases are connected.