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Ex-SocGen trader found guilty of copying HFT code

It's reported that he can face 10 years max if found guilty on all charges. After prison terms, he will be deported back to India.

I'm going to make a list of some criminal attorneys in NYC area that Quantnet members can reach out to. Hopefully they will never use it but when you are in dire need, having some pre-selected names sure beats randomly google or search YellowBook in a panic.

Anyone wants to suggest someone?
 
I'm going to make a list of some criminal attorneys in NYC area that Quantnet members can reach out to. Hopefully they will never use it but when you are in dire need, having some pre-selected names sure beats randomly google or search YellowBook in a panic.

Anyone wants to suggest someone?
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With one fell swoop, Andy nearly doubles the net shadiness of quantnet.com
 
euroazn said:
With one fell swoop, Andy nearly doubles the net shadiness of quantnet.com
Click to expand...

Merely a pragmatic measure. And for anyone who knows some history, money and shadiness are joined at the hip. I'm not comfortable saying this but every rich man I have known personally has been involved in something illegal. I'm reminded of Michael Corleone in Godfather 3: as he explains to his sister, he thought that eventually if he rose high enough, everything would be done cleanly and legally but "the higher I go, the crookeder it becomes."

Musing about the possible need for legal counsel, Quantnet could branch out and provide these and other professional services to subscribing members. Or is there already a professional association for quants that does some of this?
 
TraderJoe said:
I certainly hope the Russian dude has the brains to hire his own attorney and to tell the government appointed attorney to take a hike. Any decent attorney can beat a rap like this. You just claim that the dude is doing his job and is working overtime at home for free just to keep his job and impress his manager.
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Really?

The jury in U.S. District Court in Manhattan convicted Sergey Aleynikov of North Caldwell, N.J., of theft of trade secrets and transportation of stolen property in interstate and foreign commerce.

Mr. Aleynikov of North Caldwell, N.J., could face up to 15 years in prison when he is sentenced March 18. Mr. Aleynikov and his lawyer, Kevin Marino, declined to comment after the verdict.
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20101210/FREE/101219990
 
Very sad to hear about this. This guy has three young daughters. Now he has to go from $400 K salary to prison.
I guess FBI has got lot of free time so that they want to send these smart, intelligent, young people to prison and ruin their lives and their families lives. Meantime, these useless, uneducated people are making a good living by selling drugs to school-children quite openly in New York City.
 
TraderJoe said:
Very sad to hear about this. This guy has three young daughters. Now he has to go from $400 K salary to prison.
I guess FBI has got lot of free time so that they want to send these smart, intelligent, young people to prison and ruin their lives and their families lives. Meantime, these useless, uneducated people are making a good living by selling drugs to school-children quite openly in New York City.
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How do you know he is innocent? Just because he has three daughters. Even Madoff has three daughters.
 
A useful article at Counterpunch:

After 35 years of practicing law in the trenches of state and federal courts, I have narrowed my advice for all my clients down to one, simple, direct sentence: "Shut Up."
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Living in Florida, I have come to love deep-sea fishing. Enter my law office, and on my walls, above my desk, staring and glaring at my clients, is a stuffed, six-foot steel blue Marlin. Below the fish is a plaque that reads: "Behold the beautiful, majestic Marlin. He would not be here if he had not opened his mouth."

As my friend William Panzer says, an Oakland, California based criminal defense attorney, also on the NORML Board of Directors, "If everyone kept their mouth shut, half the people in jail would not be there. The cop's job is to put you in a cage and anything you say beyond identifying yourself helps them put you there." His advice too: "Shut up."
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Samarth Agrawal was sentenced to three years for stealing SocGen's proprietary high frequency trading algorithms yesterday, making him the first person to be convicted of stealing high frequency code.
 
Thanks for the updates, @darth. I have meant to follow up with the sentencing. Since it's a non-violence crime, he probably ends up in a low-security prison. You can almost feel how much the whole experience has terrified him.
From the article that darth links, Fisher (the defendant's lawyer) said that Agrawal prays to a picture of his mother and grandfather in his cell and "feels remorse on a level that I have never known" in his decades of practice.
 
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