The Wrong Call Option

We as human beings want a good amount of wealth majorly because we can enjoy ourselves and also for our family members as well so that we can have a smooth life ahead of us.

Everyone knows we can get rich in 2 ways either through sheer hard work perseverance and using skill or through some dodgy methods which also make one rich but in the long term will hurt you because you skipped the hard deeds and didn't use your brains to get rich.

April 11, 2017, was a normal day in the city of Dortmund not normal because it is matchday and the team takes on AS Monaco in a crucial champions league quarter-final the Showstopper of European Football, and the second leg was to be played in Signal Iduna Park one of the most beautiful stadiums in Europe you should go sometime there.

Shortly before 7 p.m.The driver, Christian Schulz, had arrived to take the players of?Borussia Dortmund,?On Schedule the bus started and headed for the stadium players were very eager and they believed it was their chance to finally win the coveted trophy but suddenly in midway three bombs in Dortmund were filled with metal pins and hidden on the side of the driveway, about midway between the hotel and the street. As the bus approached the road, the bombs exploded, sending a cloud of heat, dirt, and metal shooting through the air. One of the bus’s windows was punctured, and glass splinters flew through the interior. A pin shot into a headrest near center back Marc Bartra (who now plays for Real Betis in Spain) barely missing his head. Schulz stepped on the gas and stopped a few hundred feet away. It seemed like a miracle: Aside from Bartra, who was put into an ambulance with an injured wrist, nobody was hurt. Most of the pins were scattered across the pavement.

No football team had ever been assaulted like this. In previous months in Germany, Islamic State terrorists had set off a suicide bomb at a music festival, killed nine people with a truck, and attacked train passengers with an ax. Two years earlier, a match between Germany and the Netherlands was called off after Israeli intelligence suggested an imminent bombing by Islamic extremists. Many in the German media assumed the same groups were behind this attack and were probably right to do so as it looked to be their work.

However, there were suspicions as well why would the Islamic State attack the Dortmund team what would they get from it but there was a reason as well to label them as a prime suspect because of what had happened in France a little over a year ago and at a time when Germany and France were playing a qualification game and some German players were involved as well in that game.

The Police quickly arrived on the scene and started talking to some people who were there at the scene of the blast and the lead investigator from the State Office of Criminal?Investigation got to the scene a few hours later. “There were a lot of places where there might be clues because everything had been launched far by the explosion,” he said later in courtroom testimony. They found remnants of an antenna and a cellphone. Each of the three bombs had consisted of a self-made explosive, 30 metal pins, and an electronic fuse that could be triggered from a distance—and which could have been assembled by an Islamic terrorist.

The search also uncovered three copies of a letter near the bomb site claiming the attack on behalf of the Islamic State. But it perplexed investigators. It didn’t have an Islamic State logo. It was riddled with simple spelling errors yet used an advanced vocabulary as if a native German speaker might have written it intending to sound foreign.

A passerby came across a charred site in the nearby woods where the attacker had assembled the bombs. The location was burned, seemingly to hide evidence, but the site was also oddly obvious. Another letter appeared on a far-left website claiming the attack had been carried out by “anti-fascist” activists. The Berlin newspaper?Der Tagesspiegel?got an email stating that the bombing had been a far-right attack on “multicultural” Germany. Police searched the apartment of an Iraqi man suspected of being an Islamic State follower and interrogated a Middle Eastern man with a L’Arrivée umbrella at home, but none of the leads went anywhere.

Shortly after the attack, BVB’s lawyer got an email from a man named Rudolf, a Dortmund fan and sports stock trader in the Austrian town of Bad Ischl. “Yesterday, strange ‘certificate option’ purchases took place on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange,” it began. On the day of the attack, he wrote, someone had purchased 60,000 BVB put options—a wager that the shares would fall below a certain price by a certain date. “A purchase like this is only rationally explainable,” he wrote, “if the buyer was expecting the stock value to go down very rapidly.” This kind of drop, he pointed out, wouldn’t happen if Dortmund lost a game. It would require something more serious, like losing players, or the entire team, in a terror attack.

Investigators contacted?Commerzbank AG, the German bank whose subsidiary, Comdirect, processed the options. Dortmund wasn’t a commonly traded stock, so purchasing €40,000 worth of BVB derivatives was unheard of. Put options are high-risk. They decrease in value as they approach their expiration date, in this case in June, and can depreciate dramatically if the stock price rises. Even more suspicious, one of the purchases had been made online only a few hours before the bombing, using an IP address at L’Arrivée Hotel.

Interviews with employees revealed that a twentysomething man with a Russian accent had checked in two days before the attack and insisted on a room with a view of the entryway. It wasn’t the man’s first visit to the hotel: He’d spent the night at L’Arrivée in early March, more than a month before the attack. Investigators soon identified the man as Sergej Wenergold, a 28-year-old German citizen living in the southern city of Rottenburg am Neckar.

For a week, investigators hid outside Wenergold’s apartment. He worked as an electrician at a biofuel heating plant in the nearby city of Tübingen and didn’t fit the terrorist profile. He had no criminal past and no connection to far-right, far-left, or Islamic extremists. In his free time, he crossbred plants and tinkered with drones. He wasn’t a soccer fan, and he didn’t seem to need money. He had a stable income and no apparent gambling problems or debts. Still, he was the only suspect. On April 21, 10 days after the attack, police surrounded his car as he arrived at work and arrested him.

Wenergold was a?Russlanddeutscher, as Russia’s German ethnic minority is called. Before World War I, more than 2 million ethnic Germans lived in the Russian empire, and several hundred thousand remain in its former territory today. Growing up in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, Wenergold was bullied for his ethnic background, and a teacher taunted him with Nazi jokes. In 2003 the family joined the large number of Russlanddeutsche returning to Germany.

They moved to the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, part of a region known as Swabia, often mocked in Germany as obsessed with order and fiscal stability. His father was a welder, and his mother, who spoke broken German, worked as a hotel cleaner. Despite having been in Germany for half of his life, Wenergold had a strong accent that made him self-conscious in groups of Germans.

In interviews, mental health professionals testified, Wenergold was withdrawn. At first, he answered questions with only a few words, leading them to question his intellect. But as the conversations continued, they saw that his reticence camouflaged intelligence. He displayed a remarkable level of self-control, too. For the past several months, he had been self-medicating with the opioid Tramadol to control anxiety.

A psychological assessment concluded that he’d struggled with mild depression for much of his adult life. Sometimes he drove recklessly on country roads as if daring himself to get into an accident. In 2013 he made a halfhearted suicide attempt by crashing his hang glider into some trees.

Initially, Wenergold denied that he carried out the attacks. But as time dragged on, he admitted that he’d built and set off the bombs and purchased the put options. He claimed he hadn’t wanted to kill anybody, but merely to create the illusion of an Islamist terror attack. The idea for the plot, he later testified, came to him while watching coverage of the 2015 Paris spree. After the killings, he looked at the valuations of French companies. “I saw that the share prices had gone down, even though the attack didn’t target anything economic,” he later testified. “I thought if there was an attack that explicitly targets a company or something like that, then its stock value would go down as well.”

If Wenergold shorted Dortmund and simulated an Islamic terror raid against the team, he figured, he could make money. Losing one game might not have a dramatic effect on it, but if “the team lost in the Champions League, and many people thought players were traumatized and couldn’t keep playing so well,” he recalled, “then a negative trend could establish itself.”

For the past several months, Wenergold’s trial has been taking place on the top floor of Dortmund’s 19th-century state courthouse. Wenergold is charged with 28 counts of attempted murder, and the proceedings have centered on whether he intended to kill the players or merely scare them. Wenergold’s lawyers have argued the latter. Because jury trials don’t exist in Germany, the case will be decided by a team of five judges. A verdict is expected in the next few months with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Throughout the trial, Wenergold has maintained an eerie composure. Even during emotionally fraught testimony, including tearful descriptions of the attack by Ginter and other players, he has sat silently, staring at his hands, dressed in his collared shirt and dark blue cardigan.

The biggest question looming over the case has been the hardest to answer: Why would Wenergold attempt to pull off such an act? It may have had less to do with proving himself a financial whiz than proving himself to a woman.

He claimed to have modeled the bombs on a Soviet explosive device with only a few instructions from the internet. He was familiar with the mines, he later said, from his service in the German army. Most of the ingredients were purchased at hardware stores or online and stored in ventilation spaces at work or in a nearby forest. He made his final preparations the night before the attack in the wooded area near the hotel. After setting the site on fire, he affixed the bombs.

The day of the bombing, Wenergold’s determination wavered—he was nervous. He checked on the explosives. He went on walks. He spent part of the afternoon at a local brothel. Before the bus arrived, he bought the options on his laptop, and at 7:16 he set off the remote detonators as the bus drove away. As traumatized players left the bomb site, he made his way to L’Arrivée’s restaurant.

Wenergold drove home, but apparently, he continued thinking about his novel strategy for gaming stock prices. “The question,” he testified, “was whether I should try it one more time, bet it all on one card.” When investigators examined his computer, they found searches for “cableway stock” and several Alpine cable-car lines, including one carrying passengers to Hitler’s former mountain retreat southeast of Munich.

According to investigators, Wenergold could have made as much as €570,000 ($607,933.50) in the unlikely event that BVB stock hit zero in the immediate aftermath of the attack. But his scheme didn’t pan out. By the time the German stock exchange opened the next day, April 12, the limited injuries had been widely reported and management had already announced a new date for the quarterfinal. BVB stock briefly dropped 2 percent, then more than recovered by the end of trading, leading Wenergold to sell most of his options the next day at a loss.

Source of findings

1 Bloomberg

2 Youtube Video Titled The Scheme almost killed a Soccer Team