Navinder Singh Sarao, the 41-year old futures trader involved in the stock market "flash crash" of 2010, was spared a long prison sentence late Tuesday as his Chicago court trials culminated a years-long legal battle.
The British trader, who has autism, was meted a one-year home imprisonment instead, after he pleaded guilty to "tricking" charges and eventually cooperated with an ongoing crackdown by US federal authorities on abusive trading practices.
A US judge sentenced the socially-awkward math genius-turned assets trader who earned tens of millions of dollars over many years and helped sparked a stock market collapse in the US from his parents' suburban London home.
Sarao avoided what could have been a harsher prison environment thanks to the prosecutors who praised him for cooperating and decided his crimes were not motivated by greed.
The court described Sarao as autistic in documents submitted before federal court trials. They emphasized Sarao's savant-like capacity to spot mathematical patterns very quickly and like no other, pointing out that he regarded futures trading as a "computer game" in which the goal was to earn points -- and not money.
Donning a black suit and blue tie, Sarao told prosecutors ahead of his trial that his life had changed drastically following his arrest, and that he would never have been involved in "spoofing" if he had realized it could put him in prison.
Sarao admitted before the court that from the moment he started trading, he became "completely addicted to it." Sarao made more money than he could have imagined, but he claimed he did not feel any different from others. "I was still just me, but I felt pressured to live a different life," he said.
The sudden plunge in shares on May 6, 2010, earned Sarao almost a million dollars and temporarily erased billions of dollars worth of value from publicly-traded firms, crushing investor confidence and leaving a lot of people wondering if the market was being manipulated.
According to District Judge Virginia Kendall, she wanted her sentence to reflect the magnitude of Sarao's actions while lessening the impact that a long jail-time would have on a person with autism.
Despite his $70 million earnings as a futures trader in a span of years, Sarao would usually eat at McDonald's using discount coupons. The most expensive thing he bought as a multi-millionaire was a $10,000 used Volkswagen, which he found too stressful to drive.
Sarao's way of life has changed very little from his days as a busy trader, living today on $336 in government welfare.
