Its quite common in the quantitative finance world. Unscrupulous people steal a model, try and peddle it to a competitor. Thing is most models only work if noone (or only a few others) are doing the same. Usually when approached, most firms stay above board and report it to the person's employer.

Citadel, for instance sued a former employee for steeling a model (he emailed the source for a model to his personal email. He was sued in federal at 8am on a Monday, fired at noon. Criminal charges came months later. Tried dispose g of the evidence by tossing hard drives in the Chicago River. Dive teams were involved to recover the drives. But, Citadel already had all they needed because they monitored all outgoing and internal communication, including MITMing SSL email services.

I'm fully aware of the sensitivites of the quant finance world, but there are plenty of high quality workplaces out there that don't have the extremely invasive approach to security that e.g. g research do.

So it looks like the whole purpose of this company is to make one (very unpleasant) person richer. What a reason to get up in the morning.