[netsharc]

This makes me wonder about the trader working for a French bank who supposedly traded too much after bypassing the limits because he understood how to edit the Visual Basic Script macros in Excel...

But Googling and DDGing "french bank collapse visual basic" didn't get me the story, but it got me results about SVB (Silicon Valley Bank) collapse. Why do I have the feeling the super-clever algorithms saw that Visual Basic is shortened to VB, and thought "Oh 'VB' is in 'SVB', he's asking about a bank, results about SVB must be relevant to this query!"

[orwin]

He was a middle office worker, in security/admin, where he verified then authorized big trades. He used his excel and VB skills to impress a front office manager and get a place in the front office as a market maker (I think he has been assistant analyst in between the two job, but that isn't relevant).

Société Générale used the same id / email adresses for him after he changed jobs, and since the user management was lacking (and wasn't audited), he was allowed to make huge trades as a MM, and authorize his own trade as an ex-security/admin guy.

I might be wrong about his exact job title in the middle office, but I 100% guaranty you the rest.

[St_Alfonzo]

When I don't get something useful with search terms, I often try to ask AI like ChatGPT:

> One famous case that somewhat aligns with this is the Société Générale trading scandal involving Jérôme Kerviel. Kerviel, a former trader at Société Générale, used his knowledge of the bank's systems to make unauthorized trades worth billions of euros, though it was more complex than just modifying a VB script in Excel.

[AtlasBarfed]

It's interesting because when I do anything like that I don't look at the language information in the AI response.

Yours is a good example. All I'm looking for is the key names that would enable me to actually get the real information without AI repackaging, which I assume to be flawed.

[St_Alfonzo]

I agree with you on that. In ChatGPT's answer, for me only names and keywords are relevant, which I can then use to start another search, and I ignore the rest of the “noise”. I was also more trying to show with my post that I occasionally use A.I. when I can only vaguely remember something and thus am not even sure what the right search terms for a classic web search would be. Like humans, ChatGPT is often able to extract the right information from imprecise, anecdotal messages and then provide suitable answers that I can then use for my further search.