[downandout]

The employees involved here broke the law by obtaining the information. However, if they had simply gone to a hedge fund without telling them where they worked, and said, "here are our predictions of these stocks, if you like the results, pay us and we'll give you more predictions," the hedge fund could have traded on it and that would not have been illegal for them to do because they had no knowledge of the actual source of the information.

The employees stealing the information would have still been liable. But had they simply accepted payment from the hedge fund in Bitcoin and not revealed their true identities to the hedge fund, they would have been much harder to find and prosecute.