Susquehanna Securities LLC and Susquehanna Investment Group filed a federal complaint on June 29, 2026 against 100 John Doe defendants, alleging an insider-trading scheme that cost the firm more than $70 million — losses it attributes to anonymously placed short-dated put options on Futu Holdings (FUTU) and UP Fintech Holding, the parent of Tiger Brokers (TIGR), ahead of a sweeping Chinese regulatory crackdown on offshore brokerages.

The case, docketed as 1:26-cv-05474-AS in federal court, centers on options activity between May 7 and May 21, 2026. According to Law360, the unnamed defendants purchased short-dated puts in FUTU and TIGR through the very brokers those options were designed to profit from — a detail that gave Susquehanna, as the counterparty market-maker, the losing side of the trade.

The timing is the crux of the complaint. China's top securities regulator subsequently launched a broad enforcement action against offshore trading platforms, naming Futu Securities, Tiger Brokers, and Longbridge, according to FA-Mag and The Straits Times. Both FUTU and TIGR are Chinese-founded, U.S.-listed retail brokerage platforms that serve mainland Chinese investors seeking access to Hong Kong and overseas markets — precisely the category the regulator targeted. When the crackdown became public, shares in both companies dropped sharply, making the pre-event puts highly profitable.

Susquehanna's theory is straightforward: someone knew the crackdown was coming before the market did, constructed a short-dated options position to monetize that knowledge, and executed through the named brokers in a way that routed the risk directly onto Susquehanna as the options counterparty. The firm is seeking recovery of the losses — described variously as over $70 million in the most recent sources — through civil litigation rather than waiting on a government enforcement referral.

The John Doe structure is a standard procedural tool in cases where plaintiffs know the shape of the alleged misconduct but not yet the identities behind it. It preserves the statute of limitations clock while the discovery process — including subpoenas to the brokers — is used to unmask the actual traders. Whether Futu or Tiger Brokers are named as relief defendants or merely subpoenaed as witnesses will matter: brokers who processed the trades hold the account-level data that would link anonymous options activity to real people or entities.

The regulatory backdrop gives the complaint its core causal narrative. China's securities watchdog has been progressively tightening its grip on cross-border retail brokerage, and an enforcement action against multiple licensed platforms simultaneously is a material event for the stocks of those platforms. Advance knowledge of such an action — if it indeed existed — would be straightforward to monetize through near-term puts. The key legal question is whether Susquehanna can establish that the defendants possessed material non-public information rather than simply making an unusually well-timed directional bet.

That distinction is harder to prove in cross-border cases. Chinese regulatory deliberations are not subject to U.S. disclosure rules, and the information chain — from regulator to whoever allegedly tipped the traders — may run through jurisdictions where U.S. civil discovery has limited reach. Susquehanna's litigation team will likely lean heavily on the statistical improbability of the options positioning: the concentration, the strike selection, the expiry dates, and the timing window relative to the announcement are all factors courts have used to infer scienter in the absence of a direct paper trail.

For the options market-making community, the case is a reminder of the structural exposure embedded in providing liquidity around politically sensitive, China-linked equities. Market-makers price optionality using publicly available information; when a counterparty holds non-public regulatory intelligence, the pricing model fails entirely. Susquehanna absorbed more than $70 million of that failure.

The suit is pending. No defendants have been identified, and none have responded to the allegations.