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a bunch of probable market makers trading in hard-to-borrow or threshold list securities claiming the option exception from the locate requirement of SHO; these traders haven’t made markets in these securities. They just make trades only to take advantage of the option mispricing. We have seven known traders who have succeeded in making multiple large trades with the same trader acting as a contra party in several hard-to-borrow or threshold list securities. It appears that several of these traders are assisting each other to avoid having to deliver shares. These actions cannot possibility be coincidental. We don’t have this many fraudulent trades in two years, let alone in two days.”
    “How much money are we talking about, Agent Warden?” Andrew Grantland asked.
    “Well, sir, in an average year we see something on the order of $10 to maybe $20 billion in fraudulent trades. The most I have ever seen in a single year was about $40 billion, to the best of my recollection. This is still an accounting nightmare, but even a conservative estimate of the level of theft in the last two days is in excess of $200 billion. I stress the use of the adjective, ‘conservative’.”
    “Do you have any clear-cut evidence of collusion?” SAC Sondregger asked very seriously.
    That would mandate involvement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
    “Not for sure. I have only had an hour and a half to gather information, but there are some suggestive findings. First, many of the traders have eastern European surnames—the majority of which are Slavic or Russian. Second, they all seem to be independent day traders with no business connection with one another. That is a coincidence of the highest order, and I am pretty much allergic to the very concept of coincidence. Third, many of the names of the traders are phonies—which is a red-flag raiser, if ever there was one. Fourth—and this is just my preliminary take—someone is pulling the strings, and that someone has to be extremely well-connected with a motley assortment of shady traders.”
    “Organized crime?”
    “The Chinese?”
    “Let me try out an answer to that,” said Andrew Grantland from the New York Regional Office. “U.S. criminal syndicates have considerable sophistication, but hardly the know-how to organize such a complicated effort. Besides, it is counter-intuitive for them. They need the NYSE and regional stock exchanges to launder their ill-gotten gains and to turn their profits in crime to legitimate earnings which are above suspicion.
    The Chinese have a very sophisticated cyber hacking and cybertage capability and could feasibly pull this off. The government and the Fed are convinced that the PRC is desperate to ensure the U.S. economy—especially the stock markets—to preserve their investments. An injury to the U.S. economy of this order of magnitude would be a catastrophe for them. They would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did anything like this. It is easier to imagine a disgruntled U.S. federal agent or an angry Tea-Partier or union boss who thinks the present administration is going to destroy his union’s entitlements, or an exasperated Milton Friedman-type intent on making a point about how inefficient democracy is doing such a suicidal thing.
    “Obviously, I don’t think any of those scenarios is reasonable. But consider the possibility that someone in the russkaya mafiya has a more-or-less pure motive to steal on the grandest scale ever accomplished in the history of the world and is completely lacking in conscience.”
    “Now, that’s believable,” muttered MSD Chief Erick Nielsen.
    “I think there is a flaw in the reasoning,” said SAC Sondregger, “while I know that the Russian Mafia is heartless and totally ruthless in its practices, they still have to operate with some level of approval by the Russian Federation. It seems unlikely to me that the Russian government would give even a ‘wink-wink, nod-nod’ to such a