‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud
geekwire.com>Evidence against Valdez includes notes in which he referred to the plan as the “OfficeSpace project"
Never take notes when planning crimes...
> 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.
Posted so many times (9 so far).. the most active was 36pts, 13 comments[0]. Granted the fellow had a file called "OfficeSpace project", but in Office Space they're inspired by Superman (Inspired to be inspired from Office Space?)
I enjoyed my time working at Zulily, the engineers are given a lot of responsibility, which can be good or bad, but I enjoyed it.
Too bad GeekWire is using the old photo, the new logo looks better.
I recognize the name of the alleged, we worked on separate teams. This should have been caught in code review, though. I have no comment to say other than that.
Can code review really catch this? If it is hidden under 20 levels of abstraction and obfuscation?
In ecommerce we work with money in cents, as an integer. If he was catching pennies off FP rounding errors (as in OfficeSpace), then that is an easy red flag during code review.
But the more I think about it, he may have gotten around a code review somehow and pushed to prod (speculation).
…then proceeded to lose it all on GME options - can’t make this stuff up
or so he alleges
Also probably just skimmed wallstreetbets, considering he put it all in GameStop.
Not the most sophisticated of plans
Did he lookup "money laundering" in a dictionary?
These days, I believe it is very hard to steal fractions of pennies from transactions. Where I work, in some cases we calculate out to 3 decimals for USD due to customers "renting" services based upon various usages.
Unlike in the Office Space movie it was more than just moving a few cents around. He employee ordered over 1000 items in a month (to resell?). That should ring any alarm bell already.
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-...
Well, it worked in Superman III...
He should have just done one of those Elon Musk crypto livestream things. Would have made more or equal $ with no risk. I dunno why people try to rip off big companies like this. The Risk vs. reward is terrible. All audited and everything traced closely.
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.
A report [0] on the Google/Facebook invoices. Such a simple idea, if they had stuck to a few $500k requests and stopped, they likely never would have been caught. As I recall (not in the linked story), one of the reasons one of the expenses was flagged was because the scammers invoiced a higher amount ($10million+) requiring additional approvals.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-t...
Edit: Fixed typo
Probably this github account - https://github.com/castroev
Spacestriker