Data Diddling
When a time-keeping clerk hoodwinked a railroad, he committed the most tried-and-tested computer crime: data diddling.
That’s just jargon for fiddling with data before or during entry into the machine.
The culprit’s duties included filling out time forms for three hundred employees, and he learned that someone had shown a fit of absentmindedness in setting up a computer system storing pay and hour records. The railroad put workers’ names as well as their identification numbers into the computer. But the machine used only the numbers to track down names and addresses to print on checks. Manually processing the forms, however, humans normally ignored the computer numbers. They actually had the gall to think of the workers just by their names.
Wheels turned in the clerk’s head. Why not sneak in overtime pay by using other people’s names on the paper forms but his own number for the myopic computer? And so his income increased by several thousand dollars each year.[[51]]
The clerk’s end came only when an auditor by chance looked over W-2 forms and asked why the railroad had been so generous toward the man. Confronted, the clerk confessed. There’s a moral here: if you have a timekeeping and payroll system, don’t rely on ID numbers alone. Attach to them the first few letters of workers’ names. Also, include a cross-comparison of names and numbers in your auditing procedure.
Today scattered terminals—or micros or minis used as them—make data diddling as tempting as ever. A police officer in an eastern city told me criminals had walked into the offices of used-car lots, sneaked in a few minutes on terminals there, and altered financial records in a credit bureau’s computer.
Forget about the mystique of computer crime. People have been diddling credit bureau files for years by changing or deleting paper records. Machines and lack of paper records in some cases just make their work easier and faster.