Crooked Wall Street traders allegedly told a newbie: 'Mess this up and sleep with one eye open at night'
A lot of the incriminating information came from transcripts of online chatroom conversations, and the quotes and anecdotes are a complete disaster.
In one instance, recounted by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), a Barclays forex trader was looking for an invitation to a particularly exclusive chatroom known as "The Cartel," which included traders from Citigroup, JPMorgan, UBS, RBS, and Barclays.
The trader, who was the main Euro trader for Barclays in 2011, made various arguments about how he "would add value" to the chatroom, according to the NYDFS.
Ultimately, they let him join for a one-month trial, but allegedly with a pretty somber warning:
"[M]ess this up and sleep with one eye open at night."
Fortunately for that trader (but probably not so fortunately, in the end), he was allowed to stay in the group until it was dissolved in 2012.
The NYDFS said a number of Barclays employees involved in "wrongful conduct" no longer work at the bank, and announced that eight additional Barclays employees would be terminated for engaging in misconduct in connection to the forex market manipulation.
It's unclear whether this guy was one of them.