AI Tools Crack Down on Wall Street Trader Code Speak (msn.com) 21
Compliance software firms are deploying AI to decode complex trader communications and detect potential financial crimes as Wall Street and London regulators intensify scrutiny of market manipulation.
Companies like Behavox and Global Relay are developing AI tools that can interpret trader slang, emoji-laden messages and even coded language that traditional detection systems might miss, WSJ reports. The technology aims to replace older methods that relied on scanning for specific trigger words, which traders could easily evade. The story adds: Traders believed that "if somebody wanted to say something sketchy, they would just make up a funny word or, you know, spell it backward or something," [Donald] McElligott (VP of Global Relay) said. "Now, none of that"s going to work anymore."
Companies like Behavox and Global Relay are developing AI tools that can interpret trader slang, emoji-laden messages and even coded language that traditional detection systems might miss, WSJ reports. The technology aims to replace older methods that relied on scanning for specific trigger words, which traders could easily evade. The story adds: Traders believed that "if somebody wanted to say something sketchy, they would just make up a funny word or, you know, spell it backward or something," [Donald] McElligott (VP of Global Relay) said. "Now, none of that"s going to work anymore."
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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The vast majority of people who work in regulated industries are not scheming in code words.
Yes, and rather then the imaginings others have posted I believe this is important bit of the article :
Until recently, a common way for companies to handle sifting through the enormous quantity of emails that a Wall Street firm produces even in a day was to apply what is known as a lexicon, an ever-growing list of words and phrases that trigger human review.
One problem: Any phrase can be innocuous or illicit, depending largely on context, so the lexicon approach can result in a large number of false positives.
Do you want Cockney rhyming slang? (Score:1)
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The article you linked to specifically says the origin is unknown, and offers a number of explanations none of which is preventing dissent.
Steganography isn't hard to do... (Score:3)
Steganography isn't hard to do. There are always ways to arrange words in some way to get a message across. One could use random spaces, perhaps even wording texts so a space after a comma means one thing, while no space is another. I'm just surprised that this isn't being done yet.
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Steganography isn't hard to do. There are always ways to arrange words in some way to get a message across. One could use random spaces, perhaps even wording texts so a space after a comma means one thing, while no space is another. I'm just surprised that this isn't being done yet.
If the "random" spaces are truly random, then they're just noise and won't be useful. If they aren't truly random, then LLM pattern tracking and matching will probably catch them.
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Huh? (Score:2)
> Compliance software firms are deploying AI to decode complex trader communications and detect potential financial crimes as Wall Street and London regulators intensify scrutiny of market manipulation
Isn't Wall Street just one big financial speculatory crime?
How would it fail? (Score:3)
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"Are you coming over for dinner?" might also be code for "go check the Draft e-mail in our shared Gmail account with dinner in the subject line" and the actual meaning is not in any single message.
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Weather Report (Score:3)
My sources at the weather service say the temperature in TuLSA could drop 20 degrees next week, but NeVaDA could hit record highs. Dress appropriately.
Can you really monitor all communications? (Score:4, Interesting)
You can monitor the office software they use to communicate, but what's to prevent them from using throwaway cell phones?
Also, if they want to evade detection, a pair of traders could use a pre-arranged set of coded signals that changes every day and never repeats. Good luck detecting that.
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what's to prevent them from using throwaway cell phones
Plausible deniability. The company is required to monitor all communications on their devices/networks. Stuff that's outside of it, can't come back and bite the company's compliance operations... that's what compliance cares about.
We really need something like this ... (Score:2)
The rooster flies at night. (Score:2)
The cake is a lie.