One click. €12.4 million gone. And the perfect man to blame.

Alex Radu is a senior project manager at one of Bucharest’s rising tech companies. With a major payment platform minutes from launch, a critical security flaw threatens the deadline—and Alex makes the kind of decision people make every day in high-pressure companies.

He moves the problem to the backlog.

Three weeks later, €12,438,600 vanishes.

The money is scattered through crypto wallets. A developer disappears. And the digital evidence points directly to Alex.

His Jira ticket.
His approval.
His name in the Git history.
His messages.
Even money transferred into an account connected to him.

To prosecutors, the case looks almost perfect.

Too perfect.

Facing prison for a cybercrime he insists he didn’t commit, Alex turns to Diana Vancea, a sharp Bucharest defense attorney who understands enough about code to know that digital evidence can lie—especially when someone has rewritten the story behind it.

As Diana tears into the evidence, one disturbing possibility emerges: the vulnerability Alex ignored was real.

But it wasn't the vulnerability that stole the money.

Someone was inside the system long before launch.

Someone knew exactly what Alex would do.

And someone needed him to make one genuine mistake so that everything else would look believable.

From corporate boardrooms and encrypted wallets to a high-stakes courtroom battle, The Backlog Protocol is a fast-paced techno-legal thriller about cybercrime, ambition, manipulated evidence, and the terrifying difference between making a mistake—and being chosen to take the blame for someone else’s crime.