Office Space

The movie Office Space describes the realistic picture people can face every day using computer technologies. This film is about people who are not willing to work where they work and therefore commit fraud at the working place in order to take revenge on the one hand and make profit on the other hand. These people are the employees of the Initech IT Company. Being not good assets for the company they are supposed to be fired. These people decide to fraud the company they work for. This type of fraud can be described as misappropriation of assets. The scheme works in the following way. Peter Gibbons, together with his two coworkers, who are supposed to be fired soon, plant the virus into the accounting system in order to embezzle a penny from each financial transaction. This money is filtered to Gibbon’s personal account. The main idea of the fraud is that the amount of money is so small that no one will have an idea that they lack some amount of money. However, the number of transactions is so huge that money will be collected significantly. The scam is called a “salami slicing” or “penny shaving”. It could work in a proper way as the best fraud is the fraud that does not affect people involved and brings profit to the cheater.

Fraud triangle characterizes three angles of the successfully planned fraud. It includes three main factors: financial pressure absence, opportunity to commit a contemplated crime and ability to rationalize the crime. Each of the three prerequisites is all part of a successful fraud.  In the movie, all the three conditions take place. Gibbon is able to commit fraud; he has all the cards in his hands as he knows the very core of the system. He also has people who are able to help. He is not pressed and has an opportunity to perform fraud without being punished.

There exists a question: How to prevent companies from such kinds of frauds? Of course, the first factor in this story is that people who are working for the company hate their work and want to take revenge. However, nothing is granted by such employees and there should be systems for the data protection with the passwords that are being updated over and over again. Today, there exist different programs that help defend the money of the company from such kind of fraud. Nowadays, people would not have such an opportunity to save money by means of viruses like this. Systems nowadays are being protected properly. Even a small fraud would be noticed and stopped immediately. 

Nowadays fraud cases are very popular. With the development of new technologies, new kinds of fraud appear along with them. One of my friends has recently become a victim of the hackers trying to debit money from the bank card account. That happened because the card data have earlier input in some other systems in the Internet. There exists a great amount of bots that are viruses remembering the data of the card that is used for the fraud. In order to be preserved from such kinds of frauds, people are to be more careful and use special Internet cards or put money on the card directly before the transaction. However, even that can have a small percent of risk as hackers become more skillful.

Cheaters working until 2008 were considering their small frauds to be lost in the enormous numbers of tremendous deeds. That differs greatly from the system big companies have nowadays. The frauds in the Office Space movie had never been detected as the fire ruined all the proofs of that. It was luck for the people who committed that fraud as they had not been punished.