Whistleblowers tend to get a bad rap in the media, but folks have to dig deep under the surface to see what’s really going on with a particular story.

And I think this is one of those times that a whistleblower did the right thing!

Read their story below and see what you think.

Pro revenge by whistleblowing.

“One of my first jobs out of college wasn’t really a true job. I interviewed at a proprietary trading firm and was offered a job as one of their traders.

Looking back, it was naive to join such a firm and this was right before the 2008 crash.

They sold themselves as being pro traders and all you had to do was put up some capital which got added to the group’s pooled fund.

After that, you went through training and once the boss thought you were ready, you would ‘go live’ with your trading account.

There were no paychecks, but you did get to keep most of your profits.

They were in for a surprise…

Later on, I learned that the bosses of such groups made money by either taking a cut from your profits or by taking a fee from your traded volume.

This group skimmed from both sides taking 15% from your profits and a fee from your trading volume which came out to about $1.50 every 100 shares traded.

For months, I spent time learning from the “Pros,” and then I began to realize along with some of the other newbies, that the only person making money was the boss.

The turnover for new traders was high. Some people lasted a month, others a year or two.

As I got to know people around the office, I began finding out that very few made any money at all.

This was a tough job.

The boss was a micromanager and watched the risk monitor for his group like a hawk. If you hit -$50 in a day, you were locked out and couldn’t trade anymore throughout the day.

Also, you were limited to trading stocks up to $40 per share with a max size of 200 shares. It was very difficult to make a living trading like this.

Here is where things get interesting. The boss took a liking to me at first because I was tech savvy.

They had a large computer lab with many trading groups and about 1,000 workstations set up for trading.

The group I was in had maybe 35-40 traders.

The floor was staffed with 2 IT techs. Needless to say, if there was a tech problem, it took a while for your support ticket to get answered.

So, instead of waiting, I just hacked the network and got the domain admin credentials (back in the days of XP and Server 2k3).

They knew what they were doing.

I then proceeded to add my account to the local admins group on my PC at the office. In turn, I was able to install updates, patches, different trading software, and more.

The IT staff never knew and the boss liked how I got around the system and gave me an additional role as the ‘unofficial IT guy’ for our group.

This exposed me to the bosses PC as well as all of the other traders.

Doing the unofficial IT work, I ended up meeting everyone in the group. As I became friends with some of the more seasoned traders, I found out that most were surviving by receiving a commission for signing up new traders and not from trading.

New traders would put $3-10k down and after the ‘training class,’ they’d go live. A small portion of that went to the employee that recruited the trader.

They got more info…

One guy, let’s call him ‘trader x’ who had been there the longest started telling me all about the boss and I began to understand how shady this whole operation was.

Having access to the bosses PC when he asked me to help with some basic tasks, ‘trader x’ stopped by and coerced me into doing some digging.

The boss was gone, and we found a lot of shady documents relating to the company.

The boss had an alternate identity, bank accounts in another name, IDs with his picture and different info. It was all very suspicious.

Shortly after that day of digging, he entrusted me to bring an envelope with some documents to the bank for him, and I did.

Although, when I met with the banker about the documents I was dropping off, she used the other name trader x and I found on the boss’s PC.

When I mentioned the name I knew, the banker had no idea who I was talking about.

A ha!

Soon after realizing it was a sketchy place to be working at, and seeing my fellow traders drop like flies due to the trading restrictions, I came across one of the boss’s emails to an unknown part that went into detail about how to properly sign up traders and bleed their accounts dry for the maximum profit.

I’m oversimplifying it here but this got to me and I went home ticked off.

Trader X and I talked about it and he confirmed that this was the bosses modus operandi.

Collect the training fee, have the trader sign the contract with the group, and cycle them out as fast as possible.

They decided enough was enough.

So that night, I went home and wrote up a post on a trading forum about the group, its practices, and warned anyone looking at joining the group to steer clear.

I went to bed and thought nothing more of the post until the next day.

The next morning, when I arrived in the office, everyone was being held in the conference room. We were all getting interviewed/interrogated about a post that was found online about our group.

Oh, no!

It was my post! I remained calm and when it was my turn, I just remember thinking to myself “Never underestimate the power of denial.”

Who, me?

When asked if I had any knowledge of anything posted online, I said that I did not.

Suspicion was there but it got dropped after I was threatened with an empty threat that if I did know anything, I was in breach of the contract I signed that stated that I could be sued for damages up to $100k.

I didn’t buckle under the pressure and maintained that I didn’t know anything.

After a few days, things cooled off and I was asked to stay late to work on the bosses PC again. This time, I pulled a copy of all the bosses emails and saved it to a flash drive.

This was gonna be interesting…

When reviewing what I took, and knowing that this was a ‘fly by night’ sort of operation going on, I packaged it up and sent the pst file to the SEC via an anonymous email address.

I then reached out to all of the traders I had known that left and were swindled out the their money and urged them to submit complaints / tips to the SEC about the trading group.

All in all, I think about 20 complaints were sent out through my efforts.

When I looped in Trader X about everything I had done, he jumped in and got more people from before my time starting with the group to submit complaints.

Now it was time for my exit. I wanted to be done with this group.

I contacted the boss and informed him I wanted my money back and based on my calculations, I should be flat overall with my account.

I made nothing and lost nothing since I had started. The boss over the phone tried to inform me that I signed a contract and according to that contract, the money was no longer mine.

They had to play hardball.

To his surprise, I told him he was wrong and that I actually had a copy of his contract.

I then proceeded to read off the sections that clearly stated that they money provided was for training purposes and would only be kept by the company if losses were not paid back to the company.

He was surprised I was able to read this off to him because all copies of this contract were only available to the traders the day they signed with the group.

He never provided a copy for your own records, and clearly did so because he did not want you to fully understand what you signed or have you scrutinize over it with a lawyer.

Once I explained my logic of how my account was flat and that my capital contribution should be fully refundable based on the wording of the contract, his response to me was “The contract isn’t open to interpretation!”

I responded by saying “You think your contract isn’t open for interpretation. Are you kidding? the Constitution is open to interpretation. What makes you think your contract is set in stone?”

He proceeded by threatening me with the clause regarding the $100k in damages and claimed he had proof I posted online about him and his group.

They got what was coming to them.

I told him I’d gladly meet him in court… I knew he wouldn’t want to go to court and I called his bluff.

A few days later I received a check for the money I initially put up to join the group.

What makes this qualify as pro revenge was that during the market crashing in ’08, the office where the group operated out of got a visit from the SEC about 3 weeks after all the complaints were received.

Trader X informed me that the boss was pulled into meetings with investigators from the SEC and a few days after their arrival, the boss was gone and the group dissolved.

Since there were many other trading groups sharing the floor, anyone left over was given the option to get their money back or to join another group on the floor.

The last I heard about the boss was that a few years after the whole SEC investigation, the parent company was investigated.

See ya later!

They ended up changing business names and downsized significantly. As for my old boss, he moved out of the country after a few failed business endeavors.

It was pretty sweet how everything played out and I was glad that most of the traders I was there with got their money back.

In the end, some of the traders who knew the full story referred to me as the whistleblower of the group but in a good way!”

And here’s what folks had to say on Reddit.

This person spoke the truth.

Another individual chimed in.

This Reddit user was impressed.

Another reader shared their thoughts.

And this person had a lot to say.

Revenge can be oh-so-sweet!

They’ll think twice about who they screw over in the future.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.