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California Hacker Caught Taking $50K, Penny by Penny

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‘Office-Space style crime makes it to the real world with less-than-perfect results. Maybe the recently charged hacker just needed someone to take a certain employee’s stapler.’ -

In the world of hacking and phishing, there are your slightly unusual attacks, significant but not super eye-catching – there are hackers involved in corporate espionage, zealous nationalists targeting news sites, and rings of malicious Canadian phishers who aren’t content to just go ice fishing. However, every once in a while a story about a hacker really stands out from the rest.

The story of Michael Largent’s hacking victories and eventual downfall is one of those sort of stories. Largent fulfilled the pop-culture dream that was popularized in such movies as Office Space and Superman 3 – stealing a large sum of money, $50,000 to be exact, a few pennies at a time.

Largent used a massive fraud scheme to trick Google Checkout and online brokers like E-trade and Schwab to send him the sum, a few cents at a time. The fraud was made possible by a common practice relatively unknown to the general public. When users open up accounts with these sites, the site sends a tiny payment from a few cents to a few dollars to the user. The payment is meant to verify that the user has access to the account and that it’s active.

By opening 58,000 such accounts, Largent funneled money through the channels into a few private bank accounts. Largent raked in $8,000 from Google’s Checkout alone.

In the end, his activities were noticed by his bank. The bank contacted him and Largent incredibly told them the entire story. He claimed that he had read the terms carefully and believed he was legally safe. He said what he was doing was not wrong and that he needed the money to pay off his debts.

Technically Largent was right – almost. What he was doing in practice was not wrong, but the fact that he used false names to do it was illegal. Largent used false names such as cartoon characters, entered fake addresses, and used fake social security numbers. These offenses opened him up to wire, mail, and bank fraud charges.

It looks as if Largent may soon be headed to “federal pound me in the…” as a certain employee in the movie Office Space exclaimed. He is currently out of jail on bail and is awaiting the charges. Interestingly Google is not pursuing damages currently and the police are not planning on charging him for the money obtain from Google Checkout. The case of Largent just goes to show you sometimes there’s a reason why a scheme that seems too good to be true hasn’t been tried more often.

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