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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't so much "falling for the scam", as "stealing from the bank".

Even if, for example, you find a loophole that allows you to make 100% guaranteed money, the deposits of the bank belong to the bank, they are not the personal funds of the CEO.

Like, putting money in treasuries is basically 100% safe. It's fine for the bank to put the money in treasuries and profit. It's highly illegal for the bank CEO to take 20 million from the bank, use it as personal funds, buy personal treasuries, and then put the money back.

The title makes it sound like the problem was that he was an idiot and fell for a scam. The true problem was that he misappropriated bank funds in the process of doing so... and if there's any one person you should expect to understand that line, it would be the CEO of a company (or I guess CFO if you have to pick one, but if you pick two it's CFO and CEO)

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The headline “CEO of very small bank gets 24 years for embezzlement” would get a lot less clicks, and almost certainly would not have ended up on the front page of Hacker News.

The fact that he was fooled into pouring it all into a crypto scam is kinda the interesting part of the story.

OP was not referring to the headline, but the general narrative. Have a clickbait headline if you will, but in the article have that thoughtful perspective.

The scam is relevant because that was what motivated him to do the illegal things. If the payoff was only treasury level interest, he (hopefully) wouldn't have been motivated to risk being caught for embezzlement.

I'm curious how many days of treasury level interest on $47 million would amount to more than the average amount taken by a convicted embezzler.

Another real life example of this, but with an employee:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owning_Mahowny

This also reminds of how an employee single-handedly brought down UK's second oldest merchant bank at the time, by speculative trading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Leeson

This makes me wonder about the trader working for a French bank who supposedly traded too much after bypassing the limits because he understood how to edit the Visual Basic Script macros in Excel...

But Googling and DDGing "french bank collapse visual basic" didn't get me the story, but it got me results about SVB (Silicon Valley Bank) collapse. Why do I have the feeling the super-clever algorithms saw that Visual Basic is shortened to VB, and thought "Oh 'VB' is in 'SVB', he's asking about a bank, results about SVB must be relevant to this query!"

When I don't get something useful with search terms, I often try to ask AI like ChatGPT:

> One famous case that somewhat aligns with this is the Société Générale trading scandal involving Jérôme Kerviel. Kerviel, a former trader at Société Générale, used his knowledge of the bank's systems to make unauthorized trades worth billions of euros, though it was more complex than just modifying a VB script in Excel.

It's interesting because when I do anything like that I don't look at the language information in the AI response.

Yours is a good example. All I'm looking for is the key names that would enable me to actually get the real information without AI repackaging, which I assume to be flawed.

I agree with you on that. In ChatGPT's answer, for me only names and keywords are relevant, which I can then use to start another search, and I ignore the rest of the “noise”. I was also more trying to show with my post that I occasionally use A.I. when I can only vaguely remember something and thus am not even sure what the right search terms for a classic web search would be. Like humans, ChatGPT is often able to extract the right information from imprecise, anecdotal messages and then provide suitable answers that I can then use for my further search.

He was a middle office worker, in security/admin, where he verified then authorized big trades. He used his excel and VB skills to impress a front office manager and get a place in the front office as a market maker (I think he has been assistant analyst in between the two job, but that isn't relevant).

Société Générale used the same id / email adresses for him after he changed jobs, and since the user management was lacking (and wasn't audited), he was allowed to make huge trades as a MM, and authorize his own trade as an ex-security/admin guy.

I might be wrong about his exact job title in the middle office, but I 100% guaranty you the rest.

Or this one:"Foutanga Babani Sissoko, known as Baba Sora (died March 2021)[1] was a Malian entrepreneur and politician. Sissoko was a member of the National Assembly between 2002 and 2014.

He was born in the village of Dabia, to the west of Mali's capital, Bamako. Little is known of Sissoko's early life.[2]

He was said to have swindled the Dubai Islamic Bank for US$242 million using claims he could perform black magic, a claim he denied saying he only went into the bank to receive a car loan'

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Bank_of_China_r...

Another example from China where two vault managers stole money to buy lottery tickets.

> Like, putting money in treasuries is basically 100% safe.

Until interest rates rise.

They still mature and yield, so the principal is not at risk. But yes, it is if you are a bank and people want to withdraw.

"Journalists" now love to use a sequence of events and then present them like a causal narrative, ignoring the real reason the final event happened. I'm so freaking sick of it.

> Journalists" now love to use a sequence of events and then present them like a causal narrative, ignoring the real reason the final event happened. I'm so freaking sick of it.

When was journalism, writing, or any sort of story-telling not done this way? Is the alternative a series of time stamped actions?

“Ex-bank CEO gets 24 years after embezzling bank funds”, 5% clickthrough rate.

“Ex-bank CEO gets 24 years after falling for crypto scam”, 50% clickthrough rate.

That’s why “journalists” use these scaremongering titles for nothing burgers.

Also, lots of “journalists” these days hide behind “I didn’t write the title, my editor/whatever did”. Well, I see you on the byline and don’t see you resigning, so I’ll hold you responsible.

As a journalist myself, I’m going to defend the article writers here. I’ve had heated discussions with editors about not changing my titles or words, and how I’d rather they didn’t run it and simply not pay me (I’m freelance)

And then it prints with my name and a ton of changes I never saw. Words I have never used, implications added. Its frustrating but I don’t think there is much I can do

I don't understand why you think the story is a "nothing burger". The crypto scam is part of what makes the story unique and interesting, and is certainly relevant. Your first headline would miss this completely. Would you be happier if it read, "Ex-bank CEO gets 24 years after embezzling bank funds to pay for crypto scam"?

It’s not new. Journo headlines have been clickbait since before there were clicks to bait.

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