Laurence Fletcher, 27 April 2021
It was only when John made a final phone call to confirm the transfer of about €10m to his family trust that he realised he was about to fall victim to a highly sophisticated financial scam.
A fraudster had spent two months pretending to be one of John’s business associates in order to gain his confidence and trick him into diverting a standard loan repayment to a different bank account.
Having obtained emails through an earlier hack of a financial services company in Liechtenstein, they studied the habits and conversational style of John’s business associate and then imitated him on email. Continue reading “Article: Anatomy of a hedge fund hack”
Unlike the devastating London Whale debacle in 2012, which was all JPMorgan eventually drawn and quartered quite theatrically before Congress (and was a clear explanation of how banks used Fed reserves to manipulate markets, something most market participants had no idea was possible), this time JPMorgan was nowhere to be found in the aftermath of the historic margin call that destroyed hedge fund Archegos. Which is may explain why JPMorgan bank analyst Kian Abouhossein admits he is quite “puzzled” by the recent fallout from the Archegos implosion (or maybe JPM simply was not a Prime Broker of the notorious Tiger cub), which however does not prevent him from trying to calculate the capital at risk from the Archegos collapse. 