There had always been rumors about Spaulding, but no hard evidence had ever surfaced. With a variety of business divisions employing over a hundred people, CIG was a mystery to outsiders. Within the company, only a small circle of executives were privy to their investment algorithms and portfolios. Those files were kept top secret and were not accessible to most employees.

Things at CIG would have continued that way had it not been for a pretty young assistant named Sabrina Foster who had filled in for Jordan Spaulding’s admin during a long-term, high-risk pregnancy leave. Sabrina, a five-year CIG employee, was moved into the inner sanctum, and given a strong speech about confidentiality and SEC regulations. She was then assigned to work for CEO Jordan Spaulding for a nine-month period. An opportunist at heart, Sabrina was aware that she had a narrow window of access to the most confidential CIG files. She recognized this could be her golden opportunity. Her first week in the new job working for the CEO, Sabrina made copies of investment documents with the intention of studying them at home and mirroring the same CIG investments using her own funds. Why should they be the only ones making huge profits in the market? It won’t hurt anyone if I invest my own money and build my own little nest egg. Nobody gets hurt and I can put some money away for my future.

For nearly a month, Sabrina tracked CIG investment portfolios each day and bought and traded her own money accordingly. Much to her surprise, her savings of $28,000 dwindled to $15,000.

At first, she thought she had misunderstood some of the investments and took another hard look at the data. She had bought and sold the same stocks on exactly the same days as a group of CIG clients only they had tremendous returns. All of them were up by thirty-six percent in the same period of time while Sabrina was down by nearly fifty percent.

Devastated and furious over her massive losses, she pored over all the confidential financial documents trying to figure out where she went wrong. It makes no logical sense. She double- and triple-checked the dates and stock prices and couldn’t find the problem. Every investment purchase she had made had been executed perfectly and still, nothing added up. My return should have been nearly $20,000 by mirroring CIG’s other investors. They’re all way up but I’m down. How can that be?

Spitting mad at herself for losing so much of her hard-earned savings and unable to go to Jordan Spaulding to complain, she called her cousin in New Jersey whose next-door neighbor was an analyst with the FBI. After the FBI neighbor listened to Sabrina’s story, he strongly advised her to speak to someone in the white-collar crime unit in the Manhattan FBI field office.