If he had just bought shares, he might have some plausible deniability to say that "I really believed in the company and I wanted to invest in it". It might still alert the authorities, but I feel it's less likely and I don't think they'd necessarily have enough to charge him.
With options, it is decidedly not an investment, just a gamble. Gambling is way easier if you are able to cheat.
- Don't do it
- Don't do it by buying short-dated out-of-the-money call options on merger targets.
- Don't email or text about it.
- Don't do it in your [mother's] account.
The second one in particular just seems so obvious to me. Options are a case where you either "win or you lose everything", and even more you have to "win by a certain time". Options are kind of fun to gamble with, I've done it once, but the advantage of vanilla shares is that you can wait as long as you need to to "win". It doesn't provoke nearly as many red flags.
When I heard back then they stored every side of every trade without getting hacked, I figured the Fortune 500’s security concerns with moving data to the cloud were likely to melt away, for better or worse.
(Matt Levin's Laws of Insider Trading from Bloomberg's Money Stuff)