[sloucher]

I worked on the computer system that determined what the spot FX rates were at the "fix". This was almost 20 years ago, I guess. (Crazy to think how many trillions of dollars were touched by my contribution).

I can confirm that not only was rigging the fix common, it was so common that there was (is?) a blacklist of institutions whose trades would be discounted when figuring out what the price of each currency should be.

That is, the people who were responsible for calculating the spot FX rates knew there were enough people trying to game the system that the software was designed to mitigate that as far as possible. To a large extent, they even knew who those people were (by no means all were UK-based).

And then the Libor scandal comes along, and everyone's like "oh noes... who knew there was manipulation and collusion!". Hmmm...