The company took several measures to protect the code, including by dividing it into multiple smaller 'units', limiting access to only those employees whose jobs require it and then only to specific units, as well as preventing the code from being downloaded to portable storage devices such as USB thumb drives.

Agrawal's alleged theft of the code began in June 2009, about two months after he was promoted to the position of a trader within Societe Generale's HFTG. As a trader, Agrawal was granted access to the trading algorithms on one unit of the proprietary code.

According to the complaint, Agrawal is alleged to have used that access to copy the entire proprietary code in that unit, as well as another unit that he was not officially allowed access to. He is also alleged to have captured several screen shots of the entire file system structure of the unit containing the code.

The copied documents, which amounted to hundreds of pages of proprietary code, some of which were stored as Word documents, were later printed out by Agrawal the next day, which happened to be a Saturday.

Though Agrawal was supposed to inform his supervisor about his presence in the office on a weekend, he did not inform anybody that he had been there.