How close have you come to committing a crime while doing tech support?
I couldn't possibly give any details, but "close enough" is probably the best answer I can give.
It's the mid 1980's, and the stock control system falls under my administration because I decided to connect all the PCs together with a 1M 10-BaseT LAN, and the now multiuser system was sitting on my (Tandon 286) server. Long story short, the MD had his fingers in the till, the corporate credit card funded his house extension, and he regularly revalued stock items to pretend that we were making money to the company owners. He even managed to invoice customers before we'd even started purchasing components. Needless to say, he used to get the external auditor very drunk on his annual visits.
Apart from being the only engineer in the business, I was given a directorship which suddenly made me liable for any tax implications of the MD's misdemeanours. I decided to have the conversation with him to mend his ways, and crafted a way of revaluing the stock each month, with the aim of correcting the stock valuation by the year end. This involved low-level editing of the database, leaving no audit trail of what I was up to (The 1980's were far simpler times ...).
It nearly worked. We got to month 10, but the call of the dark-side got to him and he committed more fraud to fund his wife's demands. There was no choice but to ring up the owners and present the facts on a Sunday afternoon - the MD was gone before Monday. I deleted the last few transactions, and no-one was any the wiser to my part in the scandal.
Was that a crime? Probably, although the people it was committed against were grateful that I put a stop to the rogue MD's actions. I even got another promotion higher up the chain of command, so no real damage was done. It will come as no surprise to learn that all the companies involved went bust decades ago, many years after my departure.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
