Credit Suisse Traders Manipulated IT Systems To Hide $500m Losses

New submitter Qedward writes with a snippet from ComputerWorld UK: "Two traders at Credit Suisse have pleaded guilty to wire fraud and falsifying data after authorities said they had manipulated the bank's record systems, as the credit crunch approached, in order to help conceal over half a billion dollars' worth of losses. The traders admitted to circumventing a mandatory real time reporting system introduced by Credit Suisse, manually entering false profit and loss (P&L) figures as the products they handled collapsed in value. They did so, according to the accusations, under heavy pressure from their manager, who has also been charged."

Re:Regulations...

[Anonymous Coward]

...we don't need no stinkin' regulations.....

You are a genius. Let's introduce a regulation against fraud. Hooray!

Re:Regulations...

[Anonymous Coward]

No just consequences. Sentence them to death, the problem will be resolved with a deterrent. Besides it is regulated they just didn't follow the rules retard...

Manipulation?

[jholyhead]

I don't think putting incorrect data into the software can really count as manipulating the IT system.

Even banking systems have to obey the cardinal rule: Garbage in, Garbage out.

Re:Regulations...

[Darkness404]

We only need protections against force and fraud. This is clearly fraud and would be punished even under the most libertarian business policies.

Re:Manipulation?

[betterunixthanunix]

Considering that manually entering a URL is classified by some as "hacking..."

http://consumerist.com/2011/06/how-hackers-stole-200000-citi-accounts-by-exploiting-basic-browser-vulnerability.html [consumerist.com]

Re:Regulations...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to actually fund regulatory agencies to notice this kind of behavior.

They entered some more 0s on a spreadsheet

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah so what ?. They added a few "0"s to a spreadsheet. Big deal.

Money that's not backed by gold (or other fuingible good) is worthless. All the current so called "debts" I keep hearing about are worthless. nobody's lost any real goods just some "0" characters ioff a spreadsheet.

Wise up suckers. Bankers write "0"s into spreadsheets and then expect you to carry out real work to pay them back for "Money" they create out of their ass.

Re:Regulations...

[IcyHando'Death]

Revenge can be sweet, but if your objective is deterrence, forget about the death penalty. There's plenty of evidence that it's ineffective. Understandably, most of that evidence looks specifically at homocide rates (not many countries impose the death penalty for wire fraud at the moment).

Re:Manipulation?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Ah, remember that there is a second, very important, factor that decides whether or not a system has been "hacked" or "manipulated" or some other sinister-sounding verb...

Whether or not it embarrasses the owner/seller of the system.

In this case, (where a multi-billion-dollar investment bank's anti-fraud system apparently allows the people it is supposed to be monitoring to just manually enter the data that the system is supposed to be verifying) it would be terribly embarrassing to People Who Matter to describe the situation in more honest terms. If anything, the fact that the 'manipulation' hasn't been described as 'highly sophisticated' and the accused as a 'hacking expert' is the surprising bit.

Were the shoe on the other foot, and this system were something being sold commercially for use in all sorts of important places(SCADA systems, say) it would be dreadfully impolite to say that it had been 'manipulated', much less(heaven help us!) 'hacked' or 'exploited'. No, it would, just naturally, be vulnerable to malconfiguration by insider threats.

Re:Australian banks

[whoever57]

Your argument assumes that bank employees do what is good for the bank. The last fnancial crisis has showed that this is simply not true. The excessive compensation schemes put in place at banks have disconnected what is good for employees from what is good for banks.

Huge bonuses were obtained by employees for deals that were very bad for the banks. Enough money to retire was paid in bonuses in a couple of years, so why would those employees care about the long-term health of the bank? External market pressures won't change that dynamic -- banks have to reform their compensation schemes.

Re:Regulations...

[aztracker1]

I don't think there are any libertarians that want to drop police/fbi forces from the budget. They're there for a reason.. though maybe FBI + ATF + CIA + NSA... is a bit excessive and redundant. It's not about no regulation, or not enforcing regulation. It's about all the ancillary agencies that don't serve a purpose in a leaner central government. For that matter, imho this includes reduction of government granted monopolies (copyright, patents, etc) in order to spur greater competition.

Re:Regulations...

[Xaedalus]

We had the kind of justice system you describe in place for most of recorded human history. The Romans crucified hundreds of thousands over their thousand year reign, the Janissaries of the Caliphate used to drop prisoners onto large spikes and impale them while alive as a warning to others, and so on and so forth. People still committed crimes. All you're advocating is reforming the system to provide immense personal satisfaction and vengeance to the wronged, rather than actual penance and rehabilitation.