As the saying goes, “the best way to rob a bank is to own one.”
A while back a saw a comic (which I can’t find) that shows a montage of a young man walking into a bank, getting hired as a janitor, then over the course of a career slowly working his way up the chain through teller, manager, and eventually bank president. As an old man he runs out the front door to a (apparently long-waiting) masked getaway driver with his embezzled money.
Also too: how does an IT bro not know to encrypt the files on his laptop that delineated his crimes?
Back in the day, i had the opportunity to plan a scam like that. I wrote the entire discount brokerage system for a major regional bank in the 80’s, with virtually no oversight. They bought a new computer for it to run on, I had to learn a new language to do it, and none of it was connected to any other system in the bank.
At the time, it only seemed like a fun thought experiment, as I was in my 20s and had not yet completely lost faith in corporate America.
I don’t really regret that, but I do regret not programming time bombs that would only trigger if I got fired or laid off.
Don’t tell anyone!
Not in Canada, which is where I was.
I came here looking for a picture of a red stapler. That’s a good one.
Fun fact: Swingline didn’t actually sell a bright red stapler until after Office Space came out and created a demand for one. The stapler used in the movie was a one-off prop painted that color because Mike Judge wanted it to stand out as the lone object of color and beauty in a soul-destroying landscape of gray and beige.
I had always thought that the stapler in the original animated short that inspired the movie was also red, but I just checked and nope, it was green.
I thought it was great that this simple short, which predated Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill and all his other later works still really contained the essence of what later became the movie. Lumberg even looks the same.
The problem of huge piles of unlikely cash is solved by the money laundering industry
Yeah, apart from the guy mentioning Office Space this doesn’t sound much like those cunning schemes; he just stole a bunch of money. (Not that it’s necessarily bad to steal from your employers)
But even in Superman III the scheme is based on the false premise that accountants don’t sweat these fractions of pennies. Which they absolutely do, because to them “off by $0.01” is just as wrong as “off by $100”. Those folks knew about rounding issues long before computers existed, which is where we get ideas like “banker’s rounding“.
A programmer thinking he can outwit accountants on their own turf…
I do programming/analysis[1]. One of my annual tasks involves updating an estimate for Finance. Finance has enough of their own localised customs that I always end up making some simple mistake from not spending enough time in their space.
Typically modelling in R, rather than in Excel. Most of my colleagues are still in Excel. ↩︎
“Coffee, Colombia’s second largest export”
Robert Vaughn Superman III
Aldrich Ames made the excuse to his bosses at the CIA, that the money Russia was paying him came from his allegedly wealthy wife’s family in Colombia. He operated for several years before he was caught.
I’m still wondering what percentage of the world population could be brought to their knees if they decide to cut us off. I suspect the person who attempted this scheme hadn’t had enough! 
Is that Colin Robinson?
Classic Engineer Syndrome. Guy attempts accounting crime while knowing absolutely nothing about accounting. He just assumed he knew roughly how it worked and thus his scheme would go undetected.
If you’re gonna take a risk that will potentially ruin the rest of your life, maybe… I dunno… crack a fucking book first?
ETA:
Another thought on this story occurs to me. A common right wing talking point is that we shouldn’t show bad behaviour in media because it will “give the bad guys ideas”. Also why video games are blamed for every mass shooting. However on the very rare occasion where someone actually does “get an idea” for crime from media, it’s always an idiot like this. Because you have to be an idiot to think a crime you see in a movie would actually work.
It could be Rob Conddry in Ballers.
I can’t tell the difference between him and Mark Proksch (Colin Robinson) in a long shot.
No it’s definitely Mark Proksch when he was in Better Call Saul.
