

Programmer who worked for Bernard Madoff is arrested by FBI - wglb
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/fbi_arrests_two_former_compute.html

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jws
_Bernard Madoff's Coconspirators arrested by FBI_ would have been a better
title.

First, it captures that more than one person was arrested. Second, it wasn't
_programming_ that was the crime. It was creating the system for concealing
the Ponzi scheme and then being paid to lie to the authorities to keep it
concealed that earned them the attention of the FBI.

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jbeda
Wow -- 60k is enough to keep these guys quiet? They must have known the river
of money coming in. That seems really low.

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duh
Programmers (or software engineers, if you like) almost never ask / negotiate
what they're really worth. I don't see how it would be any different in
finance.

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randombit
Probably so. However on Wall Street in general (especially in areas investment
banking portfolio management, high frequency trading, etc) programmer salaries
in the 100-150k range is the norm. Part of that is simply NYC cost of living,
of course, but 60k is really seriously low, even for an entry level gig.

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duh
> programmer salaries in the 100-150k range is the norm

This is the norm outside of Wall St as well, for anyone who has actual talent
and/or experience and isn't a spineless pushover. For example, a truly
talented sales engineer can easily make $250k/year + benefits and equity
compensation.

> 60k is really seriously low

It was a 60k bonus.

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Jeema3000
actually $250k is kinda low. a ludicriously talented sales engineer (level 60
of course) can easily make a bajillion dollars a year if not more...

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ejames
I find myself wondering: How exactly would you go about doing the ethical
thing in a situation where you realize your work is such that you're being
offered hush money to stay quiet about it?

I don't mean "how" in terms of "how do I know the right thing to do", more a
question of what, exactly, is the best way to do the ethical thing without
getting burned.

Is it better to take the hush money and pretend to be satisfied, then whistle-
blow to the FBI once your corrupt boss thinks you're happy? What kind of
evidence would you need in order to convince an FBI agent, in a phone
conversation, that you are calling in a real crime and not just a prank? If
your law-enforcement contact asks you to wear a wire to work and have a
leading conversation with your boss, should you do it? What kind of corporate
espionage do you perform to make sure a corrupt business does not shred or
cover up evidence?

Maybe I've been seeing too many spy movies recently, but I find myself
fascinated by questions like that.

There's lots of hacker literature about what to do when you're an employee in
the middle of an unsuccessful company, and some about what to do when you are
attempting to catch a cracker or other computer saboteur on your network, but
I don't think I've ever seen a story or essay on the subject of what to do
when your company is not merely clueless but literally criminal.

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Flankk
Honest people do not write software to defraud investors. Despite the story,
they had no stroke of conscience convincing them to leave. You would _never_
tell a criminal organization that you're going to expose them unless you're
blackmailing them; there would be no benefit. These guys are con artists.

I think an honest, rational person would contact the FBI in private and seek
their counsel on how to proceed.

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ejames
Yeah, my questions don't really apply to the pair in the story; they knew from
the beginning that the software was for fraudulent purposes, and simply lost
their nerve after a while, then got arrested anyway on charges of conspiracy.
Getting cold feet after the crime has been committed does not earn you
leniency.

I suppose I'm thinking of it more along the lines of, say, the person in the
next cubicle/department over who knows about such software and wonders what to
do about it.

Contacting the FBI and asking the professionals what to do is the most
obviously correct path. It's just a matter of curiosity that I wonder what
they would say, and whether the advice would work.

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patrickgzill
I get the feeling these guys were looking up the definition of money
laundering in the dictionary.

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AGorilla
They (allegedly) programmed a computer to generate false records. It's not
like they created a trading model that happened to break an esoteric SEC law,
it was probably pretty darn clear to these programmers that they were doing
something illegal.

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byrneseyeview
If I were running a Ponzi scheme, and I needed to generate fake results, I
might ask developers to create a program that generated a month's worth of
random trades (perhaps explaining that this was a way to test the expected
commission + slippage of a strategy that covered a given volume and mix of
securities). Then I'd run it twenty times and pick the top result. Being in
the 95% percentile every month was close to what Madoff did; he never showed
extraordinary profits (except to people who were apparently in on it), but did
show incredibly consistent returns of ~1% per month.

