A Boston-area restaurant owner obtained private financial data about Vistaprint from a former employee and her husband, and then used the illegal insider information to make trades in the firm’s stock that netted him over $850,000, a federal jury heard Tuesday during opening statements in the restaurant owner’s trial. Vistaprint, a web-based seller of customizable business materials and promotional products, is owned by Top 40 distributor Cimpress (asi/162149).

Charlie Jinan Chen is charged with multiple counts of securities fraud and with making a false statement to investigators after they began looking into his run of successful Vistaprint trades from 2012 through 2014, according to a federal indictment.

David H. London of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission told the jury Chen received confidential information from close family friends: a former Vistaprint accounting manager London identified only as “Jenny” and her husband “Kevin.” According to the criminal charges, the former Vistaprint employee – who resigned in 2015 – prepared and reviewed Vistaprint’s quarterly earnings data before it was public, as part of her duties. Nonetheless, Chen obtained Vistaprint’s financials from the couple in advance of the information’s official 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, according to the indictment.

“He wasn’t lucky, he didn’t do careful financial research and he wasn’t smarter than other investors,” London said during the trial, as reported by Law360. “He made this money because he had unfair and illegal advantage. He cheated.”

Chen bet half of his wife’s retirement money and cleaned out his brokerage account to bet $105,000 against Vistaprint before the company had one of its worst quarters ever, London said. When the government began investigating, Chen denied knowing Kevin at first, and then said they were not good friends despite the fact that they had been on trips to Hawaii and Europe together, London said.

Chen was named in an SEC complaint and parallel federal indictment last April. The SEC case also lists his wife, Shui Foon Mok, accusing her of unjust enrichment for reaping some of Chen’s allegedly ill-gotten gains. That case is on hold while the criminal case against Chen plays out.

Valerie S. Carter, Chen’s attorney, told the jury that Chen made money on Vistaprint because the company puts so much of its financial information up online for anyone to access. “The government can’t believe that the little guy beat Wall Street, but the evidence will show that’s exactly what happened,” Carter said. “And he did it without help from his friends or anyone else.”

Carter told the jury Jenny and Kevin will not be testifying during the trial, which is expected to last about a week. According to prosecutors, both Jenny and Kevin decided to plead the fifth. Testimony began Tuesday afternoon and is scheduled to continue Wednesday morning.

Neither Vistaprint nor Cimpress is deemed culpable for the alleged fraud; the former Vistaprint employee is believed to have supplied the information of her own accord without the companies’ knowledge.

If convicted of a securities fraud charge, Chen faces a potential maximum of 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000. The charge of making a materially false statement provides for a sentence of no greater than five years in prison, one year of supervised release and fine of up to $250,000.