re: #56 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷

There was once a case (though it was a criminal case) where a person who worked in the payment processing centre for active duty military personnel was sent to prison for a long time for embezzlement.

The government used to pay only whole-dollar amounts in pay cheques. Cents would be kept on account until they surpassed a full dollar, to make cheque accounting easier.

Someone wrote a software program to divert a few cents from each cheque to their own account in Switzerland.

Each active duty person only lost a few cents.

After that came to light, the law was changed to pay out exact amounts.

This was kind of what the programmers were doing in “Office Space.” Except they programmed it badly and it was taking out more than just pennies.

I can tell you, given my experience working for a bank and my firsthand, up close and personal experience with processing payments, you can’t just grab pennies like that. I was never so paranoid about balancing accounts than I was when I worked in commercial real estate. And over the years, we’ve had incidents involving tiny amounts of money, like an interest rate off by .01 percent or a charge implemented in error. But when spread over a lot of accounts and a period of time, and adding in any regulations that might have been violated, the amount of money involved could be significant.