On February 10, 2025, the SEC provided an exemption for broker-dealers from the requirement to report certain personally identifiable information (PII) for natural persons, including names, addresses, and years of birth, to the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT). The exemption stemmed from increasingly sophisticated schemes by criminals to intercept such information to impersonate a customer or broker-dealer and gain access to a customer's account. This information was originally collected to help regulators identify the person(s) responsible for trades. Prior amendments in 2020 exempted the reporting of social security numbers. The SEC confirmed that the CAT will still be able to generate reliable and consistent anonymized customer IDs even if such PII is not reported, and confirmed SEC investigative tools to identify insider trading, market manipulation, and other nefarious schemes.