In a move reminiscent of Raja Rajaratnam and his Galleon Group hedge fund, the FBI has arrested seven seemingly respectable Wall Street players that the US Attorney then charged with trafficking in insider information about Dell and Nvidia.

They allegedly realized $61.8 million shorting Dell in 2008 and another $15.7 million illegally trading Nvidia for a total of nearly $78 million.

The friends, described by the government as a "criminal club," worked for five different hedge funds and investment firms. The SEC has filed parallel civil charges against them.

Rajaratnam is now serving an 11-year prison term for illegally earning $75 million on dozens of trades executed over six years. The new crop of defendants was a lot more efficient.

They include Anthony Chiasson, who co-founded the now defunct Level Global Investors hedge fund; Todd Newman, who used to head technology trading for the Diamondback Capital Management hedge fund; another former Diamondback employee Jesse Tortora; and Jon Horvath, currently employed at Sigma Capital Management, a unit of SAC Capital. Chiasson used to work at SAC too, which keeps coming up in these raids.

Also arrested was Whittier Trust manager Danny Kuo, who joined the hedge fund in 2008. Spyridon Adondakis, a former junior analyst at Level Global, was also charged.

The SEC said former Neuberger Berman investment analyst Sandeep Goyal worked at Dell in 2006-2007 and got Dell's 2007-2009 quarterly earnings and other data from a Dell insider in its investor relations department and its corporate development office from March 2009 through April 2010. It could be the same person; it's not clear.

Goyal then tipped off Tortora who passed the information around to Newman, Horvath, Kuo and Adondakis among others. Adondakis allegedly gave the information to Chiasson.