Well, it worked in Superman III...
‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: ‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud
#22Probably this github account - https://github.com/castroev
Re: ‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud
#23I 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.
Re: ‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud
#24He 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
Re: ‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud
#25These 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.
Re: ‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud
#26I 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?
Re: ‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud
#27I 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).
Re: ‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud
#28Spacestriker
Re: ‘Office Space’ movie gave Zulily engineer a blueprint for financial fraud
#29Unlike 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.
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-...