13 ms·
JP Morgan fined by SEC for deleting email records
- aziaziazi 3y agoThis double as a great PR communication toward any businesses that want their data be secured. Secured as in « out of legal reach »
- dghughes 3y agoSimilar to that my provincial Conservative government and other Conservative governments in the region don't write down or type any meeting minutes. No notes nothing to give FOI requests. Dirty tricks!
- aziaziazi 3y agoSuch inspirational, any other institutions shall learn from that! Let’s teach that technique in business and administration schools.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoI prefer to just store the data in /dev/null - so much cheaper than using a business to do it for you.
- EGreg 3y agoI believe them
- tsukikage 3y agoThis, but unironically. When a law requires data to be retained for X time, risk-averse companies interpret this as an instruction to immediately delete said data as soon as time X passes, and use automated tools to this end. Sadly, these tools tend to be ad-hoc software written and maintained by internal teams, and thus about as buggy as you'd expect. I've worked in such places, and - in addition to all the other issues - the continuous collective loss of corporate knowledge makes life pretty miserable.
- vxNsr 3y agoAdditionally it looks like they farmed out the project to a third party that was working with FINRA to ensure compliance, apparently that consulting agency failed at their task miserably.
- djbusby 3y agoTask failed successfully.
- nashashmi 3y agobig companies like JPM just don’t have the secret networks of bad actors at an administrative level to carry out nefarious activities like this without someone blowing the whistle.
- ilyt 3y agoOr the data was in just in a directory of some guy that then got shared to everyone else in the project, instead of using per-project share. Then he removed it and everyone else had it gone because of that.
- blitzar 3y agoI consider retaining documents beyond X time to be incompetence at best, negligence at worst. Tech and their, deleted means we keep it forever but mark it as deleted, should take notice.
- duckmysick 3y agoAre there off-the-shelf solutions for legally mandated data retention and deletion? If not, who are the typical go-to players in this area?
- subpar 3y agoWe're in the early days of building this over at phaselab.co. We've been taking more of a data privacy angle, but the product helps folks operationalize all of their data lifecycle / governance tasks. There are some existing players who work with email/comms, but for internal technical systems & user data most orgs are rolling their own deletion pipelines.
- TheNewsIsHere 3y agoI’ve been insinuating otherwise playfully in this thread. But, it is unfortunately absolutely realistic that companies are throwing away data the moment they can justify it. Ironically, it’s not the ones we’d like to forget about us most. Data retention is a liability as much as it is an asset, and it’s challenging regardless. If you’re a large enough company you will eventually come to be frustrated by whatever policies you have (either they’re too conservative or too liberal). And understandably when you’ve been caught being shady enough, even an honest deletion will look shady.
- phoe-krk 3y ago"Accidentally".
- wunderland 3y agoEveryone makes mistakes, it’s ok. Just try not to delete evidence next time.
- bell-cot 3y agoMeanwhile, the government seems to have accidentally deleted its records of your tax payments for the past 12 years. I'm sure you understand how that can happen. Pay up.
- dickersnoodle 3y ago"Accidentally". Right.
- romwell 3y agoBonus points for having archival practices that make shooting onself in the foot extra easy.
- strangescript 3y ago"Oopsie Daisy"
- littlestymaar 3y ago> Worse still, the stuffup meant that it couldn't produce evidence that that the SEC and others subpoenaed in their investigations Oopsie, that's too bad. Totally accidental though I swear.
- wkat4242 3y agoIf an individual does that, they get held in contempt. But with a corporation all they can do is fine, so it just becomes a cost of business :(
- WJW 3y agoGetting held in contempt of court is usually punished with a fine for individuals as well, so how is that different?
- r13a 3y agoThe difference is that if you were to be held in contempt of court, your fine would probably be higher than something like 0.01% of your annual earnings.
- andsoitis 3y ago>The difference is that if you were to be held in contempt of court, your fine would probably be higher than something like 0.01% of your annual earnings. Fines are not based ad hoc on how much you're able to pay. They're standard and the enforcer can't make you pay more - that would be terrible.
- littlestymaar 3y ago> Fines are not based ad hoc on how much you're able to pay. They're standard and the enforcer can't make you pay more - that would be terrible. In socialist dictatorship like…check notes… Finland and Switzerland, they are. Those countries are indeed notorious for being terrible places to live… /s (Well, I'm sure the multi-millionaires getting a €120k speeding tickets hated it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-businessman-hit-with-121000-speeding-fine https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...) > Can you imagine a low wage earning getting away with stuff because they can't pay? But somehow this is OK if that's rich people getting away with it… (Sarcasm aside, nobody prevents the legislator to ad a floor to the fine, to avoid this exact issues, and unsurprisingly that's what the aforementioned countries do)
- ranting-moth 3y agoHappened to me twice every week on average last year. I hate when it happens.
- orangepanda 3y agoI automated my accident
- napsterbr 3y agoThat's called devops!
- DonHopkins 3y agodevoops
- ilyt 3y agoContinuos Disaster
- systems_glitch 3y agoSeriously underrated comment chain here.
- thret 3y agoA $4 million fine? That's so much cheaper than the cost of archiving!
- oxfordmale 3y agoIt is probably cheaper than the original fine if they had kept the evidence.
- DrBazza 3y agoIt would be ironic if amongst the messages deleted was "Is $4m less than what we'd be fined for that other thing we did?"
- DrBazza 3y agoThis attitude is actually common place in the industry. Can we make more profit than the fine for market abuse?
- KMnO4 3y agoReminds me of the infamous Fight Club scene > Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
- salawat 3y ago...That's actually textbook business/enterprise risk management calculation believe it or not. Not a facsimile or artistic exaggeration. If you want to know why so much shady crap happens, part and parcel of that is when we fo catch malicious behavior, the fines are so small as to be cost of doing business.
- fkarg 3y agothat's probably true actually
- 3y ago
- ssss11 3y agoWhoops my bad. Oh well.
- tikk 3y agoanyone gonna use AI to "do something about" top-level management of the SEC being an accessory to various crimes, or about corruption, money laundering and all that jazz? haven't read about a single startup, now that I think about it ...
- lockhouse 3y agoWhat, like with a cloth?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gunapologist99 3y agohahaha took a second. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MaoNDzZ8Mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MaoNDzZ8Mw)
- ranting-moth 3y agoIANAL but in many countries the judge might draw adverse inference and effectively assume what was in that evidence. That wouldn't be in the deleters interest. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference
- danuker 3y agoThe SEC is not in the justice business. It is a puppet of the banks themselves. A $4M fine is NOTHING for a company netting $12.62B a QUARTER.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoThe $4M is a slap on the wrist, but if there's evidence that it was done on purpose, and the deleted data is evidence for a bigger case, they'd be in much bigger trouble still. But, innocent until proven guilty; if there's no indication of any missing evidence, it'll stay at the failure to retain data fine.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago> Worse still, the stuffup meant that it couldn't produce evidence that that the SEC and others subpoenaed in their investigations. "In at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory investigations, eight of which were conducted by the Commission staff, JPMorgan received subpoenas and document requests for communications which could not be retrieved or produced because they had been deleted permanently," the SEC says. That would seem to be an indication of missing evidence
- chaostheory 3y agoNo one went to jail for the 2008 crisis, and most of the regulatory bodies are private corporations masquerading as a public entity. To add salt to the wound, the SEC is very discerning as to when to enforce the law It doesn’t matter whether or not the above paragraph is reality, because masses perceive it as reality, and trust in public institutions continues to dive. If confidence isn’t restored soon, then things might start to destabilize
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoDidn't we just have a hedge fund's physical records warehouse burn down, too, under such similar accident(s)?
- rekoil 3y agoYes, supposedly a shelf fell and knocked the fire-suppression system out. I forget if that was the cause of the fire or simply the excuse for why the fire-suppression system didn't put the fire out and save the documents. It was TD Ameritrade documents mostly it seems, but it was located close to a Citadel-owned building as well.
- RobotToaster 3y agoWow, what a "coincidence".
- FreshStart 3y agoAnonymous cynically comically infamously deletions they happen. And here I was expect yet another database definition, but got a debased definition.
- boffinAudio 3y agoMaybe Americans should be asking for the NSA's support in protecting the rights and freedoms of their country, and give Congress the backup they definitely made of all of JP Morgans data .. EDIT: its amazing - not a mention of the fact that JPMorgan is under investigation for its relationship with Epstein ..
- NickC25 3y agoFor sure. This is bad faith 101 from JPMC, and I don't really think they'll care if they get a slap on the wrist. 4 million dollar fine IIRC. The government's agencies that have this data should release it to the American public as a public service. JMPC is no longer under investigation for Epstein - they paid a fine and that's that, sadly. Mr. Dimon doesn't want to testify again, because there's a high chance the Feds knew he was lying when he claimed in his first testimony that he had never heard of the guy and then claimed that he had no idea what Epstein was doing. Which if you follow the people involved, you know was a bold-faced lie. Yet JMPC will walk away unbothered, because they are untouchable.
- cornercasechase 3y ago> JMPC is no longer under investigation for Epstein. Yes they are, JPMC is still being sued by the Virgin Islands government. They have a settlement that still needs to be approved with the victims.
- NickC25 3y agoAh, you're right about that. I thought the 200-million odd settlement announced a few weeks back was the same thing. It's not. Hope the USVI gets all they are asking for and then some. The way Dimon testified it's so obvious he knew what was up - I mean, he worked with Jes Staley for nearly a decade, and promoted him to the head of JPMC's investment bank. There's no way in hell a guy in such a position who has a personal client transacting billions of dollars with former and current heads of state (including multiple former or future US Presidents), Fortune 50 CEOs, famous academics and also was convicted of sex trafficking in 2006 can hide that all from his boss. I don't believe that for a second.
- can16358p 3y ago"Accidentally".
- hhh 3y agoI’ve made this kind of accident before. Within my first 6 months there was a massive internal investigation of someone entering the building without authorization, as they had made their own keycard. I had been asked to analyze a machine’s event log to see what happened, and on a Teams meeting with a dozen people proceeded to right click the event log and mistakenly hit clear, unconsciously accepting the dialogue box. That was embarrassing, but I was direct about it. I always just pull the plug and image the disk since.
- eviks 3y agoOut of curiosity, were you also the one who made the keycard?
- MengerSponge 3y agoWhoopsie I'm such a klutz ;P Look, I didn't mean to do the espionage thingy, especially in public ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- francisofascii 3y agoHa, this comment reminds me of the Robert Hanssen, the infamous FBI spy. At one point he was put in charge of the internal effort to find "the spy".
- londons_explore 3y ago> right click the event log and mistakenly hit clear Had you immediately pulled the plug on the machine at that point, you would almost certainly have been able to recover the event log. Sure, it would have been many days effort, but probably better than failing to get evidence of a suspected evil do-er.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BLanen 3y ago> to a project where the company aimed to delete from its systems any older communications and documents that were no longer required to be retained. Literally no reason to do this but for this precise goal.
- escapedmoose 3y agoI was the records retention lead for a bank for a few years. Deletion projects are also conducted to reduce storage costs, but yes, ensuring that you’re not retaining unnecessary information that you could be subpoenaed on is a large factor as well.
- billythemaniam 3y agoStorage costs are an excellent reason as someone else said. Another reason is security, less data sitting around to be leaked, either accidentally or purposely, the better. Another reason is privacy, less data sitting around that can be used against you.
- kobalsky 3y agoyou don't owe the information you are not required to keep IF you have deleted it. if you still have it and delete it after you were asked to provide it, it will land you in jail. this is IRS audit 101. I guess they have their own similar reasons.
- rvz 3y ago"accidentally" Of course they did! /s
- eddyzh 3y agoThe accident is not the deleting but the not having sufficient backups.
- TheNewsIsHere 3y agoA lack of backups designed for “just such an occasion,” of course.
- gizmo 3y agoAggressively deleting all records the moment it’s legally allowed is the name of the game. Records are a real liability for banks so the moment they can go they’re gone. Unless the fines become existential or the c-suite goes straight to jail this won’t change.
- itiswhatitis9 3y ago[flagged]
- sensanaty 3y agoIf it weren't so depressing it'd be incredibly hilarious how blatant and open the corruption here is, as if anyone on planet earth is gonna buy this BS story. The fines for these types of accidents should be starting with the letter B and ending with illions, lets see how often these types of mistakes happen in the future afterwards.
- amelius 3y agoFines? You mean detention.
- aziaziazi 3y agoCan’t you pay to get out of detention in the US?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jprete 3y agoDo you mean bail? The only thing bail does is get the defendant out of jail until the trial, and the only (Constitutional) reason to jail someone before trial is to make sure they show up. E.g. Elizabeth Holmes got out on bail, but just recently went in to serve her sentence.
- aziaziazi 3y agoIndeed I meant bail. I always thought you can avoid jail that way in that country and very pleased you taught me I’m wrong, this seems a more fair system. Not thankful for the downvoters although they probably thought I was cynical or something… but hey better have knowledge than points.
- Floegipoky 3y ago> the only (Constitutional) reason to jail someone before trial is to make sure they show up Well cynicism is definitely called for wrt bail, because it's regularly used for a very different purpose. It's normal for people accused of crimes to have to wait over a year for their trial in this country, and the courts often intentionally set bail so high that the accused can't possibly afford it. They are forced to choose between sitting in jail that whole time while their life evaporates, or they can plea guilty to a crime they may or may not have committed; the actual punishment is often less severe than being found innocent at trial. The prosecution can repeatedly push back the trial to keep the pressure on. Since healthcare access is almost always tied to employment, people plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit every day in this country so that their kids don't lose their access to healthcare. Just the sort of systemic, everyday corruption that we're supposed to pretend can't happen here.
- SillyUsername 3y ago$4 million is a day's trading I guess? Got away lightly by the sounds of it.
- d0gsg0w00f 3y agoI work for a large bank and can confirm that I can only see the last 6 months of emails. I assume this archiving rule just got applied too liberally. However, I doubt that will assuage the conspiracy theorists.
- gameofcode 3y agoThe archiving could have moved it onto another platform that you don't have visibility of.
- Kneecaps07 3y agoEveryone thinks it's malicious. I'm more likely to believe it was a poorly-trained IT person who thought they were in the test environment, or something along those lines.
- boredumb 3y agoThis happened because JPMorgan is under investigation for its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein the person who invited wealthy scientists, politicians and businessmen to come to an island where he also raped kids. It doesn't matter, anyone that even mentions it will eventually be relegated to the "her emails" camp and disregarded. Can never tell if i'm just getting older and taking more notice or the blatant corruption we seem to shrug off is actually growing (probably the prior).
- lo_fye 3y agoLOL @ “accidentally”.
- kris_lujanovic 3y agoAs someone who worked in finance I call b.s. When you need to do any infrastructure change not to mention data manipulation it takes million signatures and meetings. Like 13 meetings to deal with one ex employee corporate cloud folder. Unless they end up in court. Then somehow million things happen on their own in their benefit.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoAlso backups. This is just corporate "The IT dept ate my homework." It's a ridiculous excuse, "punished" with a trivial fine.
- lwkl 3y agoBacking up the email database is probably a bad idea for an org like this, because they have data that isn’t allowed to be backed up. I had a customer that got accidentally sent confidential data to the wrong email address and it was backed up for multiple months. In the end we left it in there but they considered deleting all the backups that contained this email. That is a good reason for having short lived backups and an archiving solution with retention policies emails.
- hdidvdksv 3y ago[flagged]
- Cpoll 3y agoAs someone who has done support for finance's IT departments, the "this was broken for years and no-one noticed" idea sounds bang-on. I've watched the millions of signatures and meetings, but none of that matters when someone screws up the implementation (but not badly enough that anyone cares to complain).
- agentgumshoe 3y agoThat was part of a legal case or publicly reported failure?
- 3y ago
- A_Venom_Roll 3y agoReminds me of the Dutch government who "accidentally" deleted confidential documents that were related to the formation of a new government. The process is under investigation, and the documents containing transcripts of conversations could be used as evidence against some political figures. This is even more remarkable, since government bodies are typically very sloppy if it comes to document retention.
- wonderingyogi 3y ago$4 million feels like chump change. I'd imagine JP Morgan globally earns that amount in less than an hour.
- ilyt 3y ago177 B in 2022 so ~484 mil/day, 20 mil/hour. So like the amount of money they earn on coffee break
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- daneel_w 3y agoIt's likelier that they ran the numbers of such an "accident" and concluded that notwithstanding new fines and more paperwork it will end up being the cheaper alternative. They are after all bankers.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoWhy does it feel like general financial law and order has completely collapsed in the last few years, and that you can get away with pretty much anything with no real punishment?
- YChacker100 3y ago[dead]
- m3kw9 3y agoMust be some juicy things on that pile if they were to choose to accidentally delete just at particular chunk
- scythe 3y ago>The vendor had apparently assured both JP Morgan and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) on multiple occasions that its media storage complied with the relevant Exchange Act rules regarding the 36 month retention period, and therefore documents falling within that period were protected from deletion. If this vendor screwed up this badly, why can't we know their name?
- wongarsu 3y agoSo the story is basically: 1. data that has to be retained for legal reasons can't be deleted by normal deletion processes 2. data that should be deleted didn't delete properly 3. to fix (2) they manually ran delete requests for times up to about the current date (back in 2018), relying on (1) to protect data 4. turns out somebody forgot to configure (1) for emails send to domains belonging to Chase (at that point the merger was 18 years ago) 5. It took 1.5 years for anyone to notice. To me it seems like number 5 is the biggest problem here. Mistakes happen, but had they noticed in time they likely would have had those messages in backups (if they don't, that's a much bigger problem). But they probably don't retain the backups for long, for the same reasons they delete old emails in the first place (legal discovery)
- nashashmi 3y agoHow many other lawsuits does this also affect?
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoThere were “at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory investigations, eight of which were conducted by the Commission staff” [1]. No doubt, more will be filed. [1] Fourth paragraph
- jbverschoor 3y agoHow… “inconvenient“
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> How… “inconvenient“ For JPMorgan, sure. That missing evidence gets interpreted adversely against JPMorgan, which means those cases are basically won. The question is how many more will arise in the coming months, perhaps years, that find reasonable claim to damages arising out of evidence the defendant has conceded it can’t bring to its defense.
- nostrfanboi 3y ago[flagged]
- cosmiccatnap 3y agoCan we stop using accident to describe the haphazard and often disingenuous policies of multi billion $ international corporations as though they are freshman writing a merge sort or something. It's not an accident when a company does it... it's a crime
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- agilob 3y agoOpsie daisy, I dropped the database! Oh no. Anyway.
- Johnny555 3y agoWhen I worked for an investment bank (over 2 decades ago), we wrote emails to a WORM storage device (I think from EMC) so it was literally impossible to accidentally delete emails without physically destroying the device (which was backed up to tape and replicated to an identical device on the other coast). We retrieved sample emails quarterly to prove the device was working.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoDoesn't really matter if this is a mistake or corruption. When you pretend you have the legitimacy to run something as big as JP Morgan then you should not be allowed to screw up that much. You earn that much money, you should demonstrate equal level of competency. They should get jail time either way.
- stronglikedan 3y agoIndeed. Not only are these slaps on the wrist accounted for in initial estimations of the cost of doing business, but then they're just written off and ironically inconsequential. There needs to be real consequences.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hospitalJail 3y agoAnyone know what the US law says about stuff like this? Even if it was a genuine mistake, if anything legal came up, does a court need to accept that the evidence is gone and that the data was probably guilt-free? (getting some obstruction of justice vibes that I had in the US in 2019.......)
- pamhalpert 3y agoouch!
- say_it_as_it_is 3y agoHow many noncompetitive contracts does JP Morgan get to provide government-related services? Is there a watchdog group following the money?
- zackmorris 3y agoSo UBI, unions and social safety nets are bad because they encourage people to be lazy and become dependent on handouts? But a company can lose millions of potentially legally damaging emails and pay a paltry fine that's a rounding error of its profits. I wonder when democracy will arrive in America. Where people overpower concentrated wealth through overwhelming majority the way we did when we broke from England. Collectively voting to break up monopolies, tax the wealthy and imprison the corrupt. I'm seeing ads on TV now for Vanguard and BlackRock, the companies perhaps most responsible for sending rents into the stratosphere and killing the dream of home ownership for millions of people. The American Dream.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoAll enterprises have shitty IT. If you want this not to happen again, don't fine them, add a regulation. Regulations are literally the only thing that makes enterprises confirm that they've done something correctly. Only when an exec VP has their bonus or freedom threatened do they take shit seriously.
- boston_clone 3y agoThere are already regulations for data retention during attorney-related incidents. > Only when an exec VP has their bonus or freedom threatened do they take shit seriously. Isn't this a fine, and not a regulation?
- celtoid 3y agoIt's hard to tell what's worse: a predatory juggernaut like JPM or the useless regulators that they've captured. "72 Hours Before JPMorgan Offered $290 Million to Make Epstein Claims Go Away, a Lawyer Disclosed that the Bank Had Withheld 1500 Documents" [0] [0] https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/06/72-hours-before-jpmorgan-offered-290-million-to-make-epstein-claims-go-away-a-lawyer-disclosed-that-the-bank-had-withheld-1500-documents/ https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/06/72-hours-before-jpmor...
- timcavel 3y ago[dead]
- wonderwonder 3y agoWonder if the Epstein emails were also "accidentally" deleted? Edit - For those downvoting me: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/new-documents-reveal-more-about-epstein-and-jpmorgan-chase.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/new-documents-reveal...