BlackRock’s Account Monitoring Not Wiretapping, Court Rules (1)

A BlackRock Inc. ex-employee’s wiretapping lawsuit alleging the firm illegally monitored his investment accounts after it laid him off failed because BlackRock didn’t “intercept” his communications as defined in the Wiretap Act, a federal court ruled Wednesday.

Plaintiff Armen Hacopian-Armen alleged that BlackRock monitored his personal stock-trading accounts and those of his wife and minor daughter for more than a year after the company laid him off, in violation of state and federal privacy laws and in breach of the company’s personal trading policy.

Judge Jed. S. Rakoff of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York granted BlackRock’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit June 2, but said at the time that an order explaining his reasons would appear “in due course.”

Rakoff’s ruling focused on BlackRock’s practice of requiring employees to conduct their trading activity through company-approved brokers as part of the company’s effort to prevent insider trading. Blackrock routinely received an electronic feed from the approved brokers with information about employees’ trades, he said.

Hacopian-Armen alleged that BlackRock violated the Wiretap Act when it continued to receive a feed of his trading activity after he left the company. But Rakoff said the federal statute applied only where a communication was intercepted contemporaneously with its transmission, not where a communication was received and then redirected to a third party.

The plaintiff’s claim failed because he didn’t allege that his communications with his broker were forwarded to BlackRock in real time, Rakoff said.

“Because Congress clearly distinguished between ‘electronic information’ and ‘electronic storage’ but chose only to prohibit interception of the former, Congress must not have intended to capture stored communication” in the scope of the Act, he said.

Rakoff also rejected Hacopian-Armen’s claim for breach of contract based on the company’s personal trading policy, holding that the policy didn’t impose any obligations on BlackRock with respect to former employees and didn’t create an enforceable contract that would prohibit it from monitoring their accounts.

The claim for breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing claim also failed because it depended on the existence of an enforceable contract, Rakoff said.

Giskan Solotaroff & Anderson LLP represents the plaintiffs and the proposed class. Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP represents BlackRock.

The case is Hacopian-Armen v. BlackRock Inc., S.D.N.Y., No. 1:25-cv-02361, 6/18/25.