Jerome Kerviel

At nearly €5bn, the fraud uncovered at Société Générale dwarfs any previous example of a single trader running up massive losses.

Kerviel was sentenced to five years in prison in October 2010, but his sentence was suspended. The former trader claims that his bosses at the French bank knew of his trading activities.

Barings Bank - £827m

The most famous 'rogue trader' in history, Nick Leeson brought down one of the grandest names in British banking.

Working in Barings' Singapore office, Leeson initially made large profits for the bank by dealing in derivatives and futures. But after running up losses, he hid his bad trades in a single account in 1992.

These losses grew over several years, forcing him into a series of increasingly desperate but unsuccessful attempts to make the money back. Leeson finally fled in February 1995 after a bet that the Tokyo stock market would rise went badly wrong.

Once the full scale of the losses became apparent, Barings was sold to Dutch banking giant ING for just £1.

In the aftermath, Leeson's managers were criticised for giving him too much leeway. Crucially, he had been allowed to settle his own trades, letting him disguise his actions.

In December 1995 Leeson was sentenced to six years imprisonment in Singapore, and was released in 1999. He is now the commercial director of Galway United.

Allied Irish Bank – £697m

Friends and colleagues saw John Rusnak as a typical 'Mr Middle America', but the Baltimore-based trader was jailed after hiding trading losses of almost $700m (£355m).

He was hired by Allfirst Financial, a division of Allied Irish Bank, in the mid-90s as a dealer on the foreign exchanges. Betting mainly on the Japanese yen, Rusnak used fictitious options contracts to hide his losses over several years.

Some outsiders suspected that all was not well, with Goldman Sachs reportedly refusing to do business with Rusnak. But it took until 2002 before routine checks finally uncovered the true nature of the bank's exposure.

By that stage, rather than sticking to his trading limit of $2.5m, Rusnak had secretly bet $7.5bn of AIB's money on the yen rising against the dollar.

At his subsequent trial, prosecutors said he had created a false identity under the name David Russell and used an address in New York to send confirmations of false trades.

Rusnak was jailed for seven-and-a-half years in a plea bargaining deal.

Daiwa Bank - $1.1bn

The president of Japan's Daiwa Bank received a particularly nasty shock on July 13 1995. Toshihide Iguchi, one of its senior US executives, confessed in a 30-page letter that he had lost $1.1bn through unauthorised bond trading.

Like Leeson and Rusnak, Iguchi ran up the losses over several years. Having risen from the back offices to become a trader in 1984, a lack of segregation within his division meant he could hide his losses from his superiors while he tried, and failed, to trade back to profit.

Following his confession, it emerged that he had conducted the cover-up for over a decade, falsifying some 30,000 trading slips.

Having once been seen as the golden boy of the department, in 1996 he was jailed for four years and fined $2.6m.

In court, he told the judge that his life was filled with guilt, fear and deception after 11 years trying to recover his losses.

Interviewed in jail, Iguchi said he had seen his earlier actions as merely a violation of internal rules.

"I think all traders have a tendency to fall into the same trap. You always have a way of recovering the loss", he told Time magazine.

Daiwa was also penalised heavily. The Federal Reserve ordered it to end all of its operations in America, leading to a sale of most of its US assets in January 2006.

Sumitomo Corporation - $2.6bn

Yasuo Hamanaka was jailed for eight years for fraud and forgery in 1997 after the one-time king of the copper market was found to have conducted rogue trading and fraud for more than a decade.

At the height of his power, Hamanaka was said to control 5% of the global copper market. His off-the-book trades forced prices up and generated large profits for years, but ultimately cost Sumitomo $2.6bn when the scandal was uncovered.

A year after his conviction, Sumitomo paid about $150m to settle claims from British and US regulators, though it did not admit or deny allegations that it knew that Hamanaka was using bogus trades to drive the copper price higher for several years.

In 1999, Merrill Lynch was fined a total of £16m for helping to finance a copper trading scandal. The London Metal Exchange said it had provided the finance to clients to undertake actions that it should have known was the basis of an attempt to manipulate the market

Other huge trading losses:

Although actual convictions for fraud are rare, many other traders have run up huge losses simply through a bad call on the markets.

These include Brian Hunter, an energy trader at hedge fund Amaranth. He had made large profits by speculating on natural gas prices, but ended up losing $6.6bn in 2006 after betting that the price of gas would rise. Unfortunately for him (but not for traders who took the opposite view), they plunged after a heatwave helped to slash the price of gas future contracts.

In 2003

a jury ruled that Peter Young, the former Morgan Grenfell fund manager, had orchestrated a complex fraud to try and steal more than £350,000.

Morgan did not face trial, after being diagnosed with an acute schizophrenic condition and repeatedly attempting self-castration.

The Serious Fraud Office alleged that Young had conducted a wider fraud that had cost Deutsche Bank, which owned Morgan Grenfell, about £300m.