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Comment by tibbetts | Hacker News Reader

I’d be pretty embarrassed if I was JPMorgan and I hadn’t profited at least ten times that much from illicit private messaging.

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Ten times 200m would be 2bn. JPMs revenue is 36bn. So you have to make over 5% of the companies whole revenue just from your WhatsApp account.

And that's just revenue. If the profit margin on your deals was 20% (pretty whopping for banking services) you'd need to bring in 10bn in revenue. That would mean doing maybe $1tn worth of deals.

What type of illegal activities were they doing that generated $2B in profits over 2 years?

Insider trading, market manipulation, every trick possible?

I certainly don’t know. Maybe they didn’t, in which case it’s embarrassing.

If you were profiting from from private messaging, it would either be at the expense of your employer or your client. Even if the second case, JP Morgan is taking on reputational risk, so at the very least they wouldn't encourage it.

JP Morgan is _notorious_ for profiting at the expense of their clients, even to the extent of calling clients names in internal communications when they're selling them "solid investments" that they know are junk. They've been charged with 5 felonies in the last 7 years or so, always with deferred prosecution agreements and multi-year probation, but enforcement is still rather weak, considering the net profit they've been able to achieve from those actions. And I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that is only the tip of the iceberg.

It's a large organization, sure, but at this point one has to ask just how much they "wouldn't encourage it" or how much do they actually institutionally discourage it.

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