Large business or small, however, don’t swear off computers and buy quill pens for your accountants. You may or may not get robbed electronically, but you’ll very possibly lose money if you cheat yourself of the benefits of computerization.
Although computer crooks may be difficult quarry at times, at least you can console yourself that they’re normally not geniuses.
Consider a story from Highland. The law caught up with one crook—presumably more knowledgeable about computers than banks—after he asked a teller to cash seven identically dated checks made out to him. The embezzler had simply learned how to take advantage of a feature in the check-printing program. It allowed checks to be reprinted in the event of mistakes; only his stupidity offset this programming error.
“You don’t have to be knowledgeable,” Highland says. “You can be an absolute idiot and try a computer-related crime.”
Some of the victims, alas, show their own streaks of naïveté. One small business lost thousands of dollars to a bookkeeper who funneled it to relatives’ firms via phony invoices. Such crimes happen with or without computers. But the company begged for trouble here by retaining an accountant old-fashioned enough to have felt at home alongside Scrooge and Cratchitt. Computers baffled him but not the embezzler, who knew of this vulnerability.
Executives at big corporations needn’t be smug about such grass-roots examples.
Many large companies, for instance, have reduced the crooks’ risks in computerized crime by auditing samples instead of everything—pulling one hundred checks, perhaps, out of a batch of four thousand. The young man trying to cash his seven duplicates worked for a large West Coast firm given to quick and dirty sampling; just tote up the odds of catching him through an audit if he’d been smart enough to go to different banks. Ideally, at least, your system should flag quirks like the seven checks.
You can also complicate life for computer crooks by studying classic cases of the past.
Mostly the criminals sinned with or against large computers. And yet eternal truths linger on even in the micro-mini age. In fact, some mainframe cases may mean even more to the desktop crowd today, with so many small computers hooked up as terminals on large systems. You might also say giant machines are acquiring plenty of pygmy siblings—joined Siamese style with them at the brains. And the big and small machines aren’t just wired together by phone or otherwise. Increasingly, mainframes are sending electronic copies to[to] micros outside data-processing departments. What’s more, in power and capabilities, the pygmies are matching some big IBMs and Univacs of yore.
So whether you’re using a $1,000 Apple or a $100,000 mini, you’ll come out ahead knowing about the Golden Oldies of computer crime.