Former Microsoft tester sent down for 9 years after $10m gift card fraud An ex-Microsoft staffer has been sentenced to nine years in prison after defrauding the Windows giant of more than $10m. The defendant, Volodymyr Kvashuk, had been found guilty of all 18 offences with which he was charged, including wire fraud, money laundering and "access to a protected computer in furtherance of fraud" …
Big company accounting rounds on 5 digit numbers for the most part. If something like this were carried out under the radar for years, it's very possible it would have slipped through the cracks. Showing up to work driving an insanely out-of-character car is probably the best way to get the forensic accountants on your scent. But especially in IT, and especially if you control both sides of an approval process, fraud can go undetected for years. There's tons of stories of regular old IT Joes stealing millions in equipment and eBaying it, all because no one was watching where the equipment went once bought.
Once you've tripped the fraud sensors, that's pretty much it. Those irregularities that would otherwise have gone through the system will start showing up everywhere and there's nothing an accountant/fraud investigator will stop at to hunt them all down.
Either be honest (best policy) or steal little, not big.
You're telling me. Test systems should never, ever be allowed anywhere near real money or real other systems (assuming here for the purposes of this argument that bitcoin is real money). They should play with pretend money within a complete ecosystem of pretend systems. I would have expected a company of the size of Microsoft to understand this. But then it doesn't surprise me that Microsoft apparently doesn't understand this.
A victimless crime? I mean, to MS this is less than a flea bite.
Yeah, "Couldn't happen to a nicer company."
Unfortunately, the money came from somewhere. At the large companies where I've worked, budget problems are often solved by adjusting what the company has direct control over: their employees. And the pain usually flows down hill.
I was once provided to a test database that was said to have been ‘sanitised’.
Turns out I had direct access to 30,000 staff records, leave records, home addresses and their payroll (plus exec bonuses).
I know, I was on there too.
Tools down.
Reported.
Asked for a new data set.
US Paper money has serial numbers. Drug residue detected on cash has caused people to be detained. Bloodhounds can detect an individual's scent on cash. Scent detectors are getting as good. How long before DNA can be detected as easily? I would say differently tracable, not untraceable.
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