Computer Coder Tries To Run Scam Inspired By Cult Classic ‘Office Space’

Did the 1999 scam work today?

(Public domain)

Office Space is a 1999 flick about a banal office job. The boss is annoying and overbearing, the copy machine is always jammed, and the company is a soulless outfit. Work sucks. To get revenge on their boss and the company, the main characters create a program that is supposed to siphon off fractions of pennies from transactions and store them in an account. After some time, the account will fill up with their ill gotten gains, and they can all retire to Mexico knowing they got one over on the company.

The movie is a cult classic, but the characters do not get away with their crime. They screwed up and would have been caught if their coworker hadn’t literally burned down their office building. That part of the movie clearly didn’t resonate with Ermenildo “Ernie” Castro, who is accused of stealing hundreds of thousands from e-commerce giant Zulily. Castro was a software engineer that was so inspired by the movie Office Space that he titled his heist plan “Office Space Project” and kept it in a Word document.

Castro’s plan was simple. He coded a program that siphoned off money from Zulily’s shipping costs. Over 30,000 transactions were affected between March and June, according to prosecutors, in which Castro stole over…