A software engineer who worked for online retailer Zulily has been charged with stealing roughly $301,000 from the company, Komo News (opens in new tab) reports, claiming to have been inspired by the plot of 1999 Mike Judge movie Office Space.
The engineer wrote code for Zulily’s checkout page, and allegedly took this opportunity to have $260,000 in shipping fees diverted to his own bank account. He’s also been charged with altering prices to buy roughly $41,000 worth of products from the site for “pennies on the dollar.”
Astute readers will have noticed that this is not how the scheme in Office Space is supposed to work. A classic salami-slicing tactic, the movie scheme involves manipulating software to ensure that fractions of cents from financial transactions are diverted into a secret account. Gus Gorman, Richard Pryor’s character, tries a similar scam in Superman 3.
In Office Space, suspicion is only aroused when a rounding error results in $300,000 being dumped into the secret account all at once. The Zulily theft seems to have involved the full amount of each shipping fee being taken, resulting in a similar amount being taken in a single month.
Unsurprisingly, this was noticed by Zulily, and a team was put together to investigate. Funnily enough, the engineer who was later arrested was part of that team. His involvement was apparently uncovered when a document was found on his computer that detailed a plan to alter logs of audits and alarms to cover up evidence of…
