A Boston-area businessman accused of obtaining inside information from a former Vistaprint employee to illegally trade in the company’s stock has been acquitted of federal fraud charges. Top 40 distributor Cimpress (asi/162149) owns Vistaprint, a web-based seller of customizable business materials and promotional products.

A jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on Friday found restaurateur Charlie Jinan Chen not guilty of the three securities fraud charges he had been facing related to the alleged insider trading. The jury, however, declared Chen guilty of making a materially false statement.

In the case, federal authorities charged that Chen used Vistaprint financial information obtained from a friend who was formerly a Vistaprint accounting manager, identified only as “Jenny,” to illicitly earn $850,000 trading on the company’s futures from 2012 to 2014. Jenny’s husband “Kevin”, also a friend of Chen and his family, provided Chen with insider information, too, authorities said.

Valerie Carter, Chen’s lawyer, said her client didn’t cheat. Rather, he used publicly available information about Vistaprint to make intelligent, gutsy trades that netted him gains.

"The government can't believe that the little guy beat Wall Street, but the evidence will show that's exactly what happened," Carter said during the trial, according to a Law360 report. "And he did it without help from his friends or anyone else."

Prosecutors argued that Chen obtained Vistaprint’s financials from Jenny and Kevin in advance of the information’s official public release. Leveraging his unfair advantage, Chen engaged in “put and call” option trading, correctly predicting how Vistaprint’s stock price would change following earnings announcements, authorities charged.

Nonetheless, the jury found the evidence wasn’t there to support the government’s version of events, and Chen – co-owner of Feng Shui restaurant in Chelmsford, MA -- was exonerated on the fraud charges. He’ll face sentencing on the false statement charge on June 26, according to court documents. Chen initially lied to authorities about his friendship with Kevin, saying they were not good friends, even though the men and their families went on vacations together and sent their children to the same Chinese Sunday school.

Jenny has not worked at Vistaprint since 2015, authorities said. Neither Vistaprint nor Cimpress were implicated in any wrongdoing. Jenny and Kevin pled the 5^th Amendment in Chen’s case, and did not testify.