ABSTRACT
In January 2008, an exceptional fraud was detected at Société Générale, one of the ten major banks in the world. The bank discovered that one of its traders had managed to avoid its internal control systems and run up exposure totaling 50 billion euros. This coincided with a significant downturn in the global markets. The risk was considerable as, if the bank had been declared bankrupt, it could have put the entire global financial system under a lot of pressure.
