SEC v. Scott O. Hirsch and Kenneth L. Friedman (insider trading, 2020)

Settled

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In March 2020 the SEC announced that Scott Hirsch and Kenneth Friedman, tipped by a senior PetMed Express manager, settled insider trading charges over trading ahead of the company's May 2017 earnings announcement. Together they agreed to pay about $576,000 disgorgement, $74,000 interest and $597,000 in penalties.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$597k

Disgorgement

$576k

Prejudgment interest

$74.1k

Total relief

$1.2m

Alleged gain

—

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced the settlement on March 19, 2020 as litigation release 24772; the complaint was filed on March 17 in the Southern District of Florida.

The complaint alleges the two men were tipped nonpublic information about PetMed's fiscal 2017 fourth-quarter and year-end results by an acquaintance who was a senior manager there, and that Hirsch also tipped relatives. Without admitting or denying the allegations, both consented to injunctions.

Hirsch agreed to disgorgement of $74,536, interest of $9,585 and a penalty of $95,472; Friedman to $501,697, $64,517 and a $501,697 penalty. The record previously showed only Hirsch's disgorgement and interest; the figures stored here are the sums for both respondents.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the release.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Insider trading — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2020-03-19 Litigation release published

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• SEC litigation release

The linked release is a work of the United States government and is not subject to copyright. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.