Junior bankers desperate to move to private equity paid for vanished information: "I've lost $300"

The greater the need for privileged information, the greater the potential to sell it a profit. Alternative data providers have monetised this. Now private equity insiders are doing the same.

Two junior bankers in London tell us they have lost money after being approached by a mysterious individual on Telegram and banking forums, offering private equity recruiting materials in return for payment in crypto. When they paid him, they say the materials disappeared and so did he. 

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"I've been burned," says one of the junior bankers affected. "He contacted me by direct message and offered me case study pdfs and Excel files for interviews with a specialist private equity firm. When I said that the price seemed too high, he also offered me an audio recording of the interviews. I went ahead and he sent me a large audio file which sounded authentic, but as soon as I paid, it disappeared."

Another junior banker described a similar sequence of events. "He demanded that I send the money ($300) before I receive the full materials," he says of the apparent scammer. "When I sent it, he blocked me and removed me from Telegram."

The individual is since understood to have been blocked by the forum concerned, but the junior bankers say he's still active on Telegram. The materials shared, seen by eFinancialCareers, include a case study interview for a content distribution business, in which applicants are given 150 minutes to prepare a financial model predicting the multiple on invested capital (MOIC) and internal rate of return (IRR).

Both the junior bankers we spoke to said the materials shared were drawn from the application process at Apis Partners, a private equity and venture capital firm investing in financial services and technology businesses. Apis declined to comment. The juniors said they were hoping Apis would clamp down on the leak, and possibly even refund their money. However, one said the emails he sends the firm have begun bouncing back. 

“The individual sounded professional and clearly did work in finance,” says one of the junior bankers we spoke to. "Private equity recruitment is so tough that the level of detail he was offering would have really helped. The individual claimed that he was part of the recruitment process. I asked why he was willing to risk it for the sake of a modest sum and he said there would be plenty of applicants.”

Selling dubious advice on getting into banking is becoming more common. Last year, we reported on a trader who purported to work for JPMorgan and was charging students £500 an hour. JPMorgan said they had no record of him working there. 

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