Seattle tech worker charged for theft inspired by the movie 'Office Space' | Hacker News Reader

Seattle tech worker charged for theft inspired by the movie 'Office Space'

komonews.com

39 pointsmysterydip15 comments

>According to police, the company’s cybersecurity staff found a document on Castro’s laptop titled ‘OfficeSpace project’, which outlined Castro’s scheme to ‘cleanup evidence’ by manipulating audit logs and disabling alarm logging.

Wow sounds like a real genius. I wonder if he also wore a shirt saying I AM STEALING FROM YOU to work?

Like Mike Judge’s other office masterpiece, Silicon Valley, where the main characters literally drop a folder titled “Skunkworks Project” in front of the CEOs door.

Nobody remembers Superman III . . .

The Metropolis-based conglomerate Webscoe hires Gus Gorman, a talented computer programmer. Gus embezzles from his employer through salami slicing, which brings him to the attention of CEO Ross Webster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_III

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2d02uk/til_t...

They mention Superman III in Office Space if I recall.

Yeah, the writing in Office Space is very self-aware about not being original.

I've always assumed that's part of the joke. The office drones' lives are so mundane that even their crime is not original.

Part of what makes office work such drudgery is the repetition ("corporate accounts payable speaking Nina speaking JUST a moment" over and over), and recycling a crime is a form of repetition.

I think the earlier movie mentioned in the Reddit thread is "Hot Millions" of 1968. The lengthy trailer has many wonderful shots of ancient compute and tape storage.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063094/

Having 1000 boxes of stuff physically shipped to your house is nothing like the penny rounding scheme described in Office Space.

You'd have to be an idiot to think you wouldn't get caught doing this.

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This reminds me more of the recent Microsoft related case: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/former-microsoft-softwa...

Step 1) Somehow use your internal employee ID/credentials to generate gift cards (genius here didn't know this was logged...?)

Step 2) Resell gift cards online

Step 3) Buy $160,000 car and $1.6m house on a salary that likely could not afford either in the current Seattle cost of living/real estate market.

Step 4) Prosecution, prison.

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And then you've also got this guy who thought he figured out a way to generate license codes for Microsoft software and sell it online as legit, and pocket the money:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/operation-software-slashers-s...

I think he had two cons going on at the same time. The article doens't make it very clear but he also programmed their checkout page to direct shipping fees to his bank account instead of the companies. That is the reference to Office Space.

> ...software engineer who is accused of a theft scheme that swiped approximately $300,000

That's 1-2 years' salary for a software engineer in Seattle. It isn't a lifestyle step function, and when you factor in the consequences of getting caught, the EV is very, very bad.

> In total, Zulily’s team said Castro had sent over 1,000 items sent to his house.

This makes the EV even worse. The single address makes it more likely you get caught, reselling 1000 items will be a part-time job on its own, and it'll take the $300,000 to $150,000.

It seems like this could be discovered through even the most cursory of antifraud team efforts by doing something like a simple database search for ship-to address and then ranking the output sorted by number of orders per US Postal-unique address.

Then you review the customer name/payment entity and discard any well known large wholesale customers who might be legitimately ordering a large number of separate transactions to the same delivery location.

If I understood, the 1000 items were worth about $40k, and he got $260k from diverting shipping fees to his account. Still not very clever.

I can see a cooler version of this, for example with Amazon where they try and steal shipping fees from you at checkout by defaulting to paid shipping when free shipping is available. A malfeasor could, whenever a customer is successfully scammed by amazon, just divert the money to themselves and make is seem like the customer actually clicked on the free shipping option.

This news article would be so much better if it were about a guy steeling a stapler.

I thought it was gonna be someone stealing printers to smash them in a field

> In total, Zulily’s team said Castro had sent over 1,000 items sent to his house.

> In an interview with police, Castro claimed the orders that came to his house were the result of a mistake during a test and he forgot to return the items and did not notify Zulily staff about the orders, the report states.

Clearly, yet another example of the dangers of testing in prod! (Sarcasm.)

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