Layla and I have been slowly making our way through CSI episodes over the last 18 months or so (thanks, Netflix). We've gotten through most of CSI and CSI: Miami, and are only now starting on CSI: NY—and one of the first CSI: NY episodes was Three Generations Are Enough, which included a story about some mercantile traders.
This was an interesting episode because it involved fraud on the New York Mercantile Exchange and digital forensics. I used to write fraud detection software for NYMEX, and I've spent a good amount of time in a digital forensics class in school.
The fraud is, in my mind, the more interesting of the two topics (I'm sure you disagree). The CSI storyline involved prearranged trades, where two traders conspire to trade a commodity (like, uhh, pork bellies) at a price below where the market is calling, at which point the buyer immediately resells the commodity at market price and pockets the difference—typically splitting it with the original seller. The original commodity holder loses out to the tune of less than a percent, but the volumes make for a significant take. This sort of thing is nontrivial to detect in realtime (due to fluctuations in the market and the inability to predict market direction) but is really easy to pick out after the data has settled, especially if the two traders do this sort of thing often.
This is really the most vanilla of the commodity exchange frauds. There's more to it, but I haven't really got the space here.
Oh, and then the forensics piece: I was a bit disappointed when ye olde CSI techs popped open the lid on a supposedly degaussed hard drive, dropped the platters into a new drive body, and fired it up—all inside a non-clean room, and without even screwing the damned platters down to the drive hub.
Look, guys: even if you're hunting down the most technologically challenged of criminals, those platters are spinning at 5,400 rpm. I think you need to bolt those down.
And what the hell would putting the platters in a new enclosure accomplish, anyway?
P.S. Good luck scanning through all those megamabytes with a hex editor.
nerd.
ponce.