Yup, the regulations in place with todays technology create some interesting incentives. If you work at a bank: * all phone calls & voicemails are recorded 7+ years (if you've worked at one long enough you know the distinct background noise/beep the recorded lines make) * all emails are kept 7+ years * all chat logs (slack/teams/etc) are saved 7+ years

Emails & chats are easier to NLP/search/flag. Drop an f-bomb, or use a word like "scam" in chat casually ("that f-bomb dinner last night was a rip-off, what a scam!") is 100% going to get auto-flagged and reviewed by compliance and/or your boss. Saying that verbally on the phone is not, because the tech isn't there to transcribe and auto-flag calls.

Recorded calls are more kept in evidence to produce in the event of an investigation triggered by something else. So a lot of senior people end up nudging conversations to the phone. They don't plan to do any crimes, and they certainly don't plan to get caught.

The next level is that for a lot of senior people, they operate almost entirely in the in-person verbal realm. There are no rules requiring any recording or record keeping of verbal discussions/meetings/etc, and implementing them would be hard if there were.

This is why in big cases, its always some low level guy or middle manager who goes down for the "crime", because they are the most senior person involved in the activity to actually commit any of it to writing. 1000% his boss, and his bosses boss were aware / in on it / even ordering the activity to happen.. they just never put that down anywhere..

Examples of this are the LIBOR "London Whale" scandal, some of the "rogue traders" like at SocGen, "Fabulous Fab", and many more.

I bet at most banks once you hit the MD level, the vast majority of outgoing emails you would see going out are simple one-word "yes/no/approved" or variations of "lets discuss offline / call me / lets meet about this". And 0.0% of them use any chat apps at work.

WhatsApp is a thorny issue because most places stopped giving out work devices but make you download all the work apps. You develop personal friendships with coworkers and feel that out-of-hours non-work chat should happen in places like WhatsApp. Sometimes innocently out of laziness, some people end up commingling a bit. A minority of cases you'll have guys actually using private apps to evade monitoring. No one wants their personal messaging off their personal devices being recorded by their workplace. Maybe the right outcome here is mandatory personal & work device segregation, companies issue "work phones" and thats the end of it.