The Salami Trick
You just can’t make sense of your savings account statement. No matter what you do, it’s a nickel off. You don’t, however, pursue the matter—not over five cents.
All over your city your fellow depositors are thinking similarly.
A computer crook, meanwhile, is growing rich.
The nickels, dimes, whatever, add up. He works at the bank and has programmed its computer to round interest downward, for instance, rather than upward. The sliced-off money goes into a dummy account. From hundreds of cheated customers, maybe thousands, he’s amassing enough over the years for a new Buick. He may even have told the computer to steal prudently and not clip anyone more than twice a year.
It’s the old salami trick, an MO of countless embezzlers inside and outside the computer world—ranging from pudgy, fat-bottomed drones to glamour figures in Hollywood and on Wall Street.
An amusing salami tale comes from Thomas Whiteside’s brilliant New Yorker series on computerized crime. The name “Zwanda” did the crook in.
Programming for a mail-order sales company, he rounded down sales-commission accounts and diverted the loot to a dummy account for a “Zwanda.” The “Z” name made sense. The computer worked alphabetically, and he could more easily guide the money to the end account.
“The system,” Whiteside says, “worked perfectly for three years, and then it failed—not because of a logical error on the culprit’s part but because the company, as a public-relations exercise, decided to single out the holders of the first and last sales-commission accounts on its alphabetical list for ceremonial treatment.
“Thus, Zwanda was unmasked, and his creator fired.”
Could Zwandas show up in your company’s microcomputer—not just mainframes? Perhaps. It’s no less likely than the micro case mentioned earlier in which the bookkeeper was paying bogus bills from his relatives’ firms.
Of course, in the case of a micro, the trouble probably will be not in the way the program is written but in how it’s set. Most micros, after all, use off-the-shelf software.