NEW YORK – Greed on Wall Street has set a record, authorities said Wednesday as they announced charges in a nearly $78 million insider-trading case. They said the scheme involved at least seven financial industry professionals, including a hedge fund co-founder who triggered a single trade that earned $53 million in profits, the largest lone transaction ever prosecuted in Manhattan.

“Today’s charges illustrate something that should disturb all of us: They show that insider-trading activity in recent times has, indeed, been rampant and routine, and that this criminal behavior was known, encouraged and exploited by authority figures in several investment funds,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara told a news conference.

He said nearly $62 million was earned through tips provided by a Dell Inc. employee to a former Dell worker who spread the information among his friends with at least five investment houses, including three hedge funds. He called it “a stunning portrait of organized corruption on a broad scale” and said it raised to 63 the number of people arrested in a government crackdown on insider trading. So far, there have been 56 convictions.

“Each wave of charges and arrests seems to produce leads to lead us to the next phase,” said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Janice K. Fedarcyk. She said the arrests were not the last in a four-year-old probe dubbed “Operation Perfect Hedge.”

“If you are engaged in insider trading, what distinguishes you from the dozens who have been charged is not that you haven’t been caught; it’s that you haven’t been caught yet,” she said.

Bharara called the seven men arrested in the latest crackdown part of “a criminal club whose purpose was profit and whose members regularly bartered lucrative inside information. It was a club where everyone scratched everyone else’s back.”

Bharara said the co-conspirators netted more than $61.8 million in illegal profits based on trades of a single stock from 2008 through 2009. The Securities and Exchange Commission said the profits, combined with $15.7 million earned on trades involving Nvidia Corp., reached nearly $78 million.

SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami said it was disturbing that the case involved high-level executives at “some of the largest and most sophisticated hedge funds in the country.”

The SEC said the case involved closely associated hedge fund traders at Stamford, Conn.-based Diamondback Capital Management LLC and Greenwich, Conn.-based Level Global Investors LP.