The Phantom Trader

Was it a mouse making all that money?

Being assigned to a special project gives you an instant boost. It makes you feel, well… special.

The case I was asked to help with concerned after-hours trading. Someone had returned to the trading floor in the early hours of the morning and submitted some sizeable currency trades.

All of the traders swore blind they had nothing to do with it. They were the first suspects because a) they knew the systems, as they used them every day and b) they had been known to stumble back into the office the worse for wear after a heavy night on the tiles.

No CCTV was available which was trained on those precise workstations, so we had to dig a little deeper.

First question — who was logged into the machine at the time of the trades?

That didn’t get us far. It turned out that the traders never logged out, so the bogus trades were submitted in their name.

Why didn’t the traders log out? We suspected laziness, but they assured us that they had the screen layout set up exactly the way they wanted and didn’t want to start again from scratch the next day. Laziness confirmed, in other words. When it came to libation time, they would just stand up and walk away from their workstations.

Was someone with a grudge out to cause harm to the Firm? Probably not. The unauthorised trades appeared all to have been profitable.

One of the more fanciful suggestions was that this stemmed from the old building’s rodent problem, that a mouse had jumped up on the keyboard and stepped on the keys in just the right order.

This wasn’t entirely implausible. In their relentless quest to give themselves an easier life, the traders had programmed their keyboard to replicate their most frequent trades in a couple of clicks.

Buy £100,000 worth of dollars? Bam, bam, done.

There seemed to be no audit trail worth a damn. These currency terminals were supplied and maintained by an outside company, who weren’t receptive to requests for information.

Then some old guy in the corner remembered that in his day these terminals used to have a hard copy printout. After some rooting around, we found a series of dot matrix printers under a table, spewing out paper. The reports were never looked at, but the output would be collected up by cleaners every few days, and the paper renewed by tech support when it ran out and the printers started beeping.

And there was the answer. Every successful trade (bam, bam) was preceded by a dozen or more error messages “Invalid Key Press”. It was, in fact, caused by a random keyboard swipe, which just happened to trigger the trading shortcuts.

The culprit? An over-eager cleaner running her duster over the keyboard at 2am or thereabouts.

Did the Firm lean on the traders to change their sloppy ways? Of course not. Traders have to be mollycoddled in every way possible, just as long as they keep producing.

Instead, the cleaners were admonished not to dust keyboards and tech support was tasked with running around the desks at 6pm to temporarily detach the keyboard from the system. while leaving the on-screen layout intact.

It rankled with me that the cleaners were given a ticking off. For that week prior to the investigation, they were actually more profitable than the traders. We should have been offering them a job on the desk.

Many thanks for reading!

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