Wall Street is paying $25,000 a day for AI trainers who used to work there



Felipe Sinisterra and Dave Wang, two ex-bankers, are booked out for the next two months teaching financial institutions to actually use the AI tools they have already bought.

Felipe Sinisterra and Dave Wang, two former investment bankers, are charging banks and investment funds up to $25,000 a day to teach senior staff how to use the AI tools their employers have already paid for, according to a Bloomberg feature published this week.

The two are fully booked for the next two months, the report said. Clients to date include T. Rowe Price, Citigroup and Bank of America.

The premise of their work is, on its face, embarrassing for the rest of the industry. Global banks have spent the past two years pouring billions into AI infrastructure, model licences and internal tooling, on the explicit thesis that generative AI will reshape financial workflows.

What Sinisterra and Wang appear to be selling is not new technology but the working knowledge of how to use what is already installed. In demonstrations, the pair show senior bankers how to use commercial models such as Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini for tasks the bank’s own staff have not yet figured out, including, in one Bloomberg-described session, analysis of a video pitch from a startup founder using Gemini’s video-understanding mode.

The credibility behind the price tag is the founders’ own pre-consultant careers. Sinisterra was at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America before leading fintech investments at SoftBank, where he deployed $2bn and incubated several AI ventures.

Wang was at Morgan Stanley and led crypto for SoftBank Latin America; he now sits on the Harvard Data Science Initiative’s advisory board. Sinisterra runs the training business under the banner of Wall Street Prompt.

The shape of demand is itself the story. Banks are not, on the evidence of the booking calendar, struggling with model access. They are struggling with what the McKinsey-flavoured AI strategy decks of 2023 and 2024 left out, which is the granular ground-level work of fitting probabilistic tools to a profession built on deterministic outputs.

Earnings interpretation, market-analysis prompting, due-diligence synthesis and pitch-deck review are all areas where, on Sinisterra’s and Wang’s account, most analyst desks are operating at a small fraction of what the underlying tools can do.

The price point is doing a particular kind of signalling work. A $25,000 day rate roughly matches what a single managing director at a large US investment bank generates in fees in a quarter; it signals, to procurement, that the cost is too small to bother negotiating.

It also outpaces what big-four consulting firms charge for comparable training engagements, which is consistent with the broader shift toward smaller, faster, ex-practitioner consultancies pulling work out of the McKinsey-Bain-BCG envelope on AI-specific mandates.

The longer-term question is whether the trainer category compresses. Anthropic itself has been actively pushing into financial services since early 2026, including a Moody’s data partnership and full Microsoft 365 integration. As model vendors move closer to delivering plug-and-play financial workflows, the value of a bespoke prompting tutorial naturally declines.

Sinisterra and Wang have so far stayed ahead by emphasising live, novel use cases that the vendor documentation does not yet cover. How long that gap stays open is a different question.

For now, the two-month waitlist is what banks are paying for. The actual training, as several recent client testimonials note, can be replicated by a moderately curious analyst with a corporate ChatGPT licence and a weekend.



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Global law enforcement operation takes First VPN offline

Pierluigi Paganini
May 21, 2026

Police seized First VPN in a global crackdown, exposed its cybercrime users, and shut down infrastructure tied to ransomware and data theft.

A major international law enforcement operation has taken First VPN offline, a service that had become a quiet staple for ransomware crews, data thieves, and other cybercriminals trying to hide in plain sight.

“The coordinated action took place between 19 and 20 May and targeted the infrastructure behind one of the most widely used VPN services in the cybercrime underground.” reads the press release published by Europol. “The gathered intelligence exposed thousands of users linked to the cybercrime ecosystem and generated operational leads connected to ransomware attacks, fraud schemes, and other serious offences worldwide.”

Authorities seized dozens of servers across 27 countries, arrested the administrator, and carried out a search in Ukraine, cutting off an infrastructure that had been used in a wide range of serious investigations.

The service marketed itself as a privacy-first VPN with no logging and no cooperation with law enforcement, which made it appealing not just to ordinary users but also to threat actors looking to mask their activity. That’s the uncomfortable part of the VPN story: the same tools that help people protect privacy on public Wi-Fi or work securely from home are also useful for criminals who want to conceal their origin, route traffic through different regions, and make attribution harder.

“For years, the service, known as ‘First VPN’, was promoted on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums as a trusted tool for remaining beyond the reach of law enforcement. It offered users anonymous payments, hidden infrastructure, and services designed specifically for criminal use.” continues the press release. “‘First VPN’ had become deeply embedded in the cybercrime ecosystem, appearing in almost every major cybercrime investigation supported by Europol in recent years. Criminals used it to conceal their identities and infrastructure while carrying out ransomware attacks, large-scale fraud, data theft, and other serious offences.”

Europol said the service name kept resurfacing in major cybercrime cases, and Eurojust confirmed that investigators had been building the case for years through a joint effort led by French and Dutch authorities. 

What seems to have made this case especially valuable for investigators is that they didn’t just shut the service down, they also got inside its infrastructure before it disappeared. That likely gave them access to user records, connection data, and other evidence that can be used to map criminal activity back to real people and devices.

Authorities dismantled cybercrime infrastructure, including 33 servers and a service based in Ukraine, and seized domains linked to the operation: 1vpns.com, 1vpns.net, 1vpns.org, plus associated onion sites. They also notified users directly and shared information on hundreds of accounts with international partners, which suggests this may lead to follow-on investigations well beyond the VPN itself.

The bigger lesson is simple: privacy tools are not the problem, but criminal operators often rely on the same infrastructure normal users trust. Once that infrastructure is compromised, dismantled, or logged, the illusion of anonymity can disappear very quickly.

“The operation has already generated significant operational results at Europol’s level:

  • 21 Europol-supported investigations advanced through the intelligence obtained.”
  • 83 intelligence packages disseminated;
  • information linked to 506 users shared internationally;

“For years, cybercriminals saw this VPN service as a gateway to anonymity. They believed it would keep them beyond the reach of law enforcement. This operation proves them wrong. Taking it offline removes a critical layer of protection that criminals depended on to operate, communicate and evade law enforcement.” said Edvardas Šileris, Head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, First VPN)







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