A Hong Kong court sent a former China Construction Bank (Asia) manager to jail this week. His job. Certify letters of credit, the paperwork that tells a supplier "the bank's good for this, ship the goods." Instead he took bribes in crypto and signed off on letters backing US$1.6 billion in trade that never existed. Ships that were never loaded. Goods that were never bought. Just a stamp, a signature, and someone getting paid in coins that don't leave a paper trail.

Here's the bit everyone skips over. A letter of credit only works because one person at the bank checks it's real. That's the whole system. Take away the checking and you've just got expensive stationery with a bank's name on it. So the fraud wasn't clever, it was just a guy deciding not to do the one job he had, for a currency that's hard to trace back to him. The court did its part. The harder question is who else at the bank signed things without looking, because $1.6 billion in fake paper doesn't move through one desk quietly.