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Bernie Madoff's Programmers Arrested
ZipK writes "With their former boss cooling his heels on a 150-year sentence, programmers Jerome O'Hara and George Perez are now in the US Attorney's crosshairs. They've been arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy, and 'accused of producing false documents and trading records at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in New York.' Apparently Madoff's fraud was too large and too complex to be foisted entirely by hand."
If you destroy evidence, make sure you destroy the backups, too.
So tell me, when are they going to go after the programmers at Goldman Sachs?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I always tell my kids that "so-and-so made me do it" is no defense. And I'm sure nearly every parent has taught their children that for generations. I hope these guys roast for not listening to their parents!
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
And that's why we have cellscripts and conjobs
You realise GS pretty much pwns the US government.
Deleted
There are so many great opportunities out there for making a legitimate living programming that it makes me wonder why these guys volunteered to spend the best years of their lives stealing from people.
If you've followed the details of the Madoff scandal, it was obvious that it required substantial computer support.
Each month, Madoff's investors got statements which showed fictitious trades and fictitious profits. The phony trades were for real stocks, with prices which were (almost) real. But the trades were chosen retrospectively, which is like betting on a race after it's run. So superficially reasonable statements came out. This was all generated on an AS-400 that had been in use for this for several decades.
The software wasn't very good. If they'd been better at it, they could have generated statements which showed trades which exactly matched real trades of others (from the "tape"; trades are public but traders are anonymous), delivered trade confirmations every day, and still shown phony profits just by picking trades randomly distributed around the 75% of each day's trades. That would survive external examination, but not a real audit. Close looks at Madoff statements show trades which could not possibly have occurred; the price is outside the day's trading range. Sloppy.
I went to an engineering school that was founded in the aftermath of WW2, so had a strong ethos of: "scientists and engineers need to understand what we're doing and why, not just implement stuff other people tell us to". I.e., don't assume the people above you are in charge of the "why" and as the scientist/engineer all you need to care about is the "how". Usually it's seen as more of an ethics thing, but interesting to be reminded that on occasion it can be a matter of self-interest, too, since you have a legal responsibility to know what you're doing and why, at least to some minimum degree.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
the trillions stolen with OTC Derivatives.
"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?" (more )
Yours In Petrograd,
Kilgore T.
Thats Mock Objects for you. I guess they were using it for real deployment too!
When you are a little fish . . . run to your lawyer, then together make yourselves the very best friends that the FBI ever had.
"Nunc Id Vides, Nunc Ne Vides"
++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
That's the usual reason.
Best Slashdot Co
Are Jerome O' Hara and George Perez ? Should have mentioned that in the article summary for the uninitiated.
So apparently "I was just following the specs" doesn't work any better than "I was just following orders"...
If it's so sloppy - make a better one then!
Just kidding.
Northern Cyprus or Somalia. Marvelous. Every other country just goes "You think he might have been naughty? Well here he is - any particular kind of metal you'd like the chains made from?"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Madoff's long-time deputy's name is Frank DiPascali? I would have figured he would be the computer programmer.
DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY. The software is licensed “as-is.” You bear the risk of using it. Madoffsoft gives no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. To the extent permitted under your local laws, Madoffsoft excludes the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.
It's all about the decimal places.
I hope they enjoy their stay at Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison.
int grumpyMod(int score)
{
printf("Redundant");
return grumpyMod(score-1);
}
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
...Oh My God! Does this mean Bernie Madoff was a robot?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Is why you write in bash, and only key it in on the command line.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Granted, they're innocent until proven guilty, etc., but it appears they were in this up to their ears.
Remember that what we're getting, so far, is the stuff from the investigation / prosecution side. Their job is to make the case that the accused were in it up to their ears.
No surprise if they were. But it will always sound that way at this stage, if the prosecutors think they have enough of a smoking gun to go ahead.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Funny that you use a casino analogy, since that's essentially what day trading is. The only people that reliably get rich in the day trading business are the brokers.
And yes, I'm sure you've got a "system" that will "never fail" to make money. So does the shlub that's about to get his legs broken by Vinnie the Fish after one too many "sure-fire" sports bets...
Madoff kept all of his billions of money in a single account at JP Morgan Chase bank. If they are going to bust his programmers, they should bust his bank too. Even for a bank the size of Chase, Madoff just leaving billions of dollars sitting in the account instead of investing it like he claimed to be doing must have gotten their attention one or a hundred times. If the bank looked the other way to hang onto a lucrative cash deposit, they are just as guilty as the programmers.
Oh no! Now how will comic book readers get new awesome multi-page spreads of thousands of comic book characters intricately detailed all posing in action shots and/or interacting?
Do guns kill people? Do bullets? Do people kill people?
This looks like a very gray area - is the gun and bullet factory to blame for each murder? Did the programmers have direct positive benefit from the code besides their salaries? Who is actually "running" the "black box" - the programmers? The sysadmins? Madoff? His company? ... ethical mine field.
-- Sig down
Anyone with grad-level know-how in Information Theory knows that the banks aren't breaking the law. (Unless a swarm of GS mathematicians have pushed the field forward without letting me know).
It's called Optimal Causal Analysis (a method of determining the most likely subsequent state from a series of previous states, without any knowledge of the underlying mechanism). In this case, you'd let it model a few thousand states, and propagate those states forward and backward in time a bit.
Then you plant computers doing this right next to the exchange computers, because any predictions more than a few hundred milliseconds and the model is too complex for your computers.
Viola! Super-fast trading using I-Theory. (The prof. teaching this has never graduated a PhD, because they all get recruited away from her veeeery quickly.)
Hi. I teach comparative politics for a living. Your attempt to place a single definition on the word liberal(ism) is just as incorrect as the parent's.
Liberalism was in fact once (17th through 19th centuries) used almost exclusively to describe exactly the situation the GP was referring to ( Liberal => libre => freedom ). In revolutionary America, the two major political philosophies were Liberalism thus defined versus Conservatism (ie, those who wished to conserve the monarchy). This led to a change in the popular use of the term Liberal in America to mean those who support change, whereas conservatism retained its, well, conservative meaning.
This change in meaning is by no means universal. In the political systems I am familiar with outside of the United States (UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain), the word retains its earlier meaning. The English Liberal Party is, by modern standards, a conservative, pro-business party and this is by no means a misnomer. In fact, in France many people use Liberal as a insult meaning roughly "right wing capitalist pig".
So, you see that words can legitimately have many meanings and political philosophy is by no means subject to the pedantry that serves computer science so well. You knew what the GP meant, as did everybody who modded you up, but you chose to be asses instead. Congratulations.
I knew it -- Slashdot needs closures!
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
. . . and then you come up with some bullshit about how Buffett is a "known conservative," and that is the reason for a "character assassination"?
And of course you get modded up to +5. Only on Slashdot . . . Doubleplusgood!
Nobody cares about the truth, as long as the lie fits the prevailing political fashion.
We're going to start a company...with blackjack and hookers - heck, forget the blackjack!
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
That would survive external examination, but not a real audit.
For all the times that the SEC was warned / tipped-off about Madoff's returns
being fishy, and all the other fund managers that invested their clients'
funds into Madoff's pyramid, NOBODY looked for the simplest "tell" of all - look
at Madoff's trading records: he made NONE - ZIP - ZERO - NO TRADES on behalf of
his clients. The statements that went out should hundreds of trades per week,
but the exchanges did not show a single transaction by Madoff!
Bah, they'll just blame it on Bernie Madoff's QA like they always do.
Somalia has no (real) government. Any government with the physical capability could kidnap you from Somalia and you'd be SOL. There isn't even a government to yell at the US about it after the fact. Going to a country with no laws seems like a worse option than going to one with a US extradition treaty...unless you think you're really good at hiding, or better armed than your pursuers (LOL!).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
.... all Engineering students had to study Ethics as part of their Engineering studies.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.