She Left Me Breathless

She Left Me Breathless by Trin Denise Read Free Book Online

Book: She Left Me Breathless by Trin Denise Read Free Book Online
Authors: Trin Denise
asked.
    “Since when did you start drinking coffee, and yes I would like a warm up, thank you.”
    Caitlyn glanced at her wristwatch. “Almost six days ago,” she said as she poured coffee into Sydney’s mug.
    “See what happens? I go out of town for six days, everything falls apart, and you become a java junkie,” Sydney said, grinning as she took a sip of the steaming liquid.
    “Just means you are too valuable to leave us,” Caitlyn laughed as she sat back down in her chair. “So the Salami Technique got its name after a bank employee who also happened to be a computer programmer accumulated a large amount of money. He averted any suspicion by not taking large amounts of money at one time; instead, he sliced off thin quantities of cash from thousands of customer accounts. He then redirected that cash into an account that he had full control over. The analogy is that he shaved money from customer accounts like a butcher would shave pieces of salami to make a sandwich.”
    “Okay, I’m with you so far. How did he do it?”
    “He wrote a program that would randomly transfer thirty to forty cents from several thousand customers’ checking accounts into the account he controlled. Over a couple of years, you can imagine how much money he had stockpiled. I think by the time he was caught it was estimated that he had stolen over three-million dollars.  
    “Why did it take so long to catch him?” Sydney asked.
    “No one complained. The amounts he took were so small that most customers never bothered to report that they had thirty to forty cent discrepancies on their statements. He had also been smart enough to never take money out of a customer’s account more than three times a year.”
    “That’s unbelievable,” Sydney said, shaking her head.
    “Well think about it. Would you go into your bank and make a fuss if you were missing thirty cents?”
    “No, I wouldn’t,” Sydney admitted.
    “And that’s what made him successful. He was banking on that exact assumption.”
    “So, how did he get caught then?”
    Caitlyn smiled. “Well it seems there was one old man who had grown up during the great depression and he was not happy that the bank had cheated him out of seventy cents over the course of one year. He went into the bank and threw what one would describe as a temper tantrum until the bank was forced to look at it.”
    “And that’s how they caught the guy?”
    “Yep and the old man got his seventy cents back as well as free checking for the rest of his life.”
    Sydney chuckled. “How common is this problem?” she asked.
    “More common than you would think. Several movies have been made about it. You’ve probably heard of them, Superman III , Hackers , and Office Space just to name a few.”
    Sydney nodded. “I have seen all of those movies but I had no idea that what they were doing actually had a name for it.”
    “I will give you an example of how easy it is to pull something off like this if you know what you are doing. Between 2007 and 2008, a 22 year-old Plumas Lake, California man named Michael Largent used the Salami Technique to accrue $50,000 in funds from the two brokering houses, E-trade and Charles Schwab and Co. He then used it to get another $8,000 from Google checkout.
    “How is that possible?”
    “When you open an account with any of those companies, you have to provide your checking account number as well as the banks routing number. The companies then make a small monetary deposit into your account. It can be as little as one penny and as high as two-dollars. You the customer, then have to go back to the company’s web site and enter the amount deposited into your account in order to verify yourself and open an account with them. PayPal is another company who has the same verification process using a debit or credit card.
    Sydney got up from her chair and refilled her coffee cup. She brought the pot over and topped off Caitlyn’s cup. 
    “Thank you,” Caitlyn said,

Similar Books

Death Of A Hollow Man

Caroline Graham

Amazon Moon

James A. Haught

Obsession

Debra Webb

Covenant

Dean Crawford

Memorial Bridge

James Carroll

Days of Rage

Bryan Burrough

The Dark Forest

Cixin Liu