Software programmer arrested for using the old "Superman III/Office Space" trick

[Mangochin]

Are we sure they’re not the same person or clones?

[anon61221983]

I don’t know… I personally don’t find them too much alike? But I can see how someone might…

[Loren_Pechtel]

@MagicFox

Yep, and the fact it took two months tells me zulily’s accounting is one month in arrears. He stole money in January. Books closed on Jan 31. Accounting reconciled everything by Feb 28. Discrepancy caught in March.

Can’t say anything about his programming skills, but he sure didn’t know anything about accounting. Like a train they caught him right on schedule.

I don’t think they need to be a month behind. Rather, they got the books, saw the discrepancy, traced where it was from and then caught him in March.

[Brainspore]

@VeronicaConnor

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.

This is also one reason we can be reasonably well assured that no software engineers would ever be able to get away with the kind of massive voter fraud the Trumpers are always alleging, even on poorly secured voting systems. The people who know what to look for would figure out something was amiss just from the numbers.

[MagicFox]

It could be, but as @bobtato mentions above, in accounting a $.01 discrepancy is as bad as a $1000 discrepancy. Most places I’ve worked did accounting a month in arrears, whether $1M or $500M annual revenues.

Real time accounting, while nice to have, isn’t really necessary when an organization is well run and has appropriate controls and segregation of duties. If these are in place, identifying and isolating discrepancies doesn’t take too long for the accounts and internal auditors.

[ghostbloke]

260,000 USD in shipping fees + 41,000 USD in merchandise seems to me like it was on the same level as naming the file after Office Space. “Nobody will get the reference unless I keep doing crimes until I reach 300,000.”

[MadLibrarian]

Zulily is one of the ‘fast fashion’ companies that advertises everywhere they can wedge in an ad, with the expected poor quality, slow shipping and terrible return terms. It appears that they have been spending their money on forensic accounting rather than quality control.

[atl]

I seem to recall Harry Harrison’s first Stainless Steel Rat story has Slippery Jim on the run when his decimal rounding fraud is found out.

[Loren_Pechtel]

@MagicFox

It could be, but as @bobtato mentions above, in accounting a $.01 discrepancy is as bad as a $1000 discrepancy.

Yeah, you should have seen accounting go nuts when they noticed that sometimes a job breakdown had “Use Tax Roundoff Correction $0.01”. Took me ages to convince them there was no other solution. (Jobs are bid on the bottom line price, it goes back and calculates the numbers needed to make it work–except sometimes there’s no possible numbers to make it work and I had to throw in a penny.)

[ptrourke]

Tells me that zulily doesn’t use source control,
or they’d have noticed that the encrypted artifact with the target bank account number was last updated by the perpetrator.