I was hired by a company that made client on-boarding software for investment banks. It did all the Dodd-Frank, EMIR and KYC stuff. It was built around SQL Server and table and column names were quite long e.g. CustomerReferenceForGovernmentCompliance. We got a client from Massachusetts, they used Oracle 8 and wanted us to use Oracle 8 in our app. Oracle 8 has a 30 character limit for column and table names, so we had a problem.

I had Oracle experience and was hired to develop a middleware to translate long DB object names to short ones in Oracle (no refactoring of the app was allowed), plus I had to convert a shedload of T-SQL to PL/SQL. I told my employer this would take months.

Two weeks in to the job I was told "You're off to Boston to demonstrate your work to the client", "Err, its not ready" I said, "Don't worry its just a demo to get our second payment from the client, it will be Okay" my CTO said.

So on the flight from Dublin to Boston, my CTO leans over and says "I'm not asking you to lie, but..."

Long story short, they rigged the application to make it look like it was connecting to Oracle, but was actually saving data in SQL Server data files. I had to convince the client it was working fine. A low level techie kept giving me the stink-eye as he could clearly see this was a scam.

On my return I resigned and called the security department of the bank concerned. My wife is a US citizen so I really don't want to get in to trouble with the US authorities. The bank took the product, but they insisted on a massive discount to not take legal action.

Okay, it wasn't my dodgy code, but I felt the experience was similar.