|
?:reviewBody
|
-
As the banking industry replaced manual bookkeeping with computerized systems as a means of keeping track of customer accounts, they unknowingly opened the door to a type of embezzlement that had previously been difficult (if not impossible) to successfully pull off on a large scale: the 'salami' technique. This was a scheme by which a bank employee (usually a computer programmer) could surreptitiously stockpile a substantial amount of money not by grabbing large sums all at once, but by 'slicing' off 'thin' amounts of cash from many different customers' accounts and diverting them to one central account (which he controlled), thereby building up a tidy nest egg while minimizing the risk that any single instance of his theft would be detected and investigated. Thomas Whiteside reported a supposedly real example of this technique in action over forty years ago, in his 1978 book Computer Capers: One way of taking the salami technique a step further was for the embezzler to cover his tracks by making even his small thefts of a few cents at a time look legitimate: Even better was a variation of this technique in which the vanished sums were so unnoticeably small that they could be uncovered only through the most rigorous of audits: In classic urban legend fashion, one version has it that the unlucky thief who tried this last method fell victim to a fluke of a company promotion and was caught: Sightings: The salami scheme is a factor in the plot of several films: 1983's Superman III, 1995's Hackers, and 1999's Office Space.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}