On Monday, the New York Field Division of the FBI announced the arrest of Samarth Agrawal, charged with theft of trade secrets for allegedly stealing proprietary computer code used in the high-frequency trading system of Societe Generale, his former employer.
Agrawal began working at Societe Generale in March 2007 as a quantitative analyst. Shortly after being promoted to a trader position in April 2009, he obtained access to the code.
In April 2009, AGRAWAL was promoted to the position of trader within the Company's High-Frequency Trading Group. On Friday, June 12, 2009, AGRAWAL obtained access to a unit of the Code ("Unit A") relating to the type of trading activity in which he was involved. However, AGRAWAL also was able to obtain access to a unit of the Code ("Unit B") with which he was not otherwise involved, and did not have permission to review.
After copying portions of the code into Microsoft Word documents, Agrawal printed hundreds of pages over a period from August to September 2009. On at least one occasion, surveillance cameras captured Agrawal placing the documents into a backpack.
Likewise, on August 31, 2009, September 2, 2009, and September 11, 2009, AGRAWAL similarly printed out multiple portions of Unit B Code, also from Microsoft Word documents, which did not relate to the trading activity in which he was involved.
On November 12, 2009, his last day in the office, AGRAWAL deleted a folder on his personal network drive that contained the Code in its original format as well as the Code that had been gathered together in Microsoft Word documents. Starting on the next day, AGRAWAL took four sick days and was absent from the Company's New York offices. Subsequently, on November 17, 2009, AGRAWAL submitted a letter of resignation to his supervisor at the Company.
After AGRAWAL submitted his resignation, one of his supervisors spoke to him in an effort to convince him to stay at the Company. Among other things, the supervisor reminded AGRAWAL of his promotion to trader and told him that if he stayed his 2010 bonus would be "many multiples" of his 2009 bonus, which had been $130,000. AGRAWAL, in declining the offer, told the supervisor, among other things, that he eventually wished to return to his native country of India to set up his own high-frequency trading firm. AGRAWAL was later contacted by an FBI agent, who was acting in an undercover capacity, and advised the agent that he had been interviewing with "most of the big names" among New York financial firms.
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