‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud (opens in new tab)

> Never take notes when planning crimes...

Relevant 'The Wire' clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBdGOrcUEg8

He could have at least called it the Michael Bolton project

>Never take notes when planning crimes...

The guy was clearly not very bright. This isn't some criminal mastermind big brain stuff. Any random dev with prod access could trivially execute something similar. But anyone with a brain knows that you'll be caught immediately. There's simply too many checks in the financial system to pull it off.

Or use encryption!!! What a noob.

Can code review really catch this? If it is hidden under 20 levels of abstraction and obfuscation?

or so he alleges

It didn't ring alarm bells because people were aware that he was placing "test orders". They just weren't aware that he was not in fact cancelling said orders.

In the Office Space movie, a bug in the the software they uploaded caused it to steal much faster than it was supposed to. Which led to everyone involved panicking about getting caught.

The stuff he ordered was part of a different thing than the 'Office Space' scam they also found. It was either an actual screw-up on his part, that he tried to cover up by reversing the charges, or a scam closer to the one a Microsoft employee tried to pull off a while back.

https://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-employee-steals-xbox-...

My guess is that it's the small to mid-sized businesses that end up being the easiest targets. Many don't have all the same record keeping or auditing practices. I've read about scammers just sending random invoices to small businesses and getting paid. Someone did this to the tube of millions to the likes of Facebook and Google, but I guess were eventually found out.