Computer crime has been around almost as long as computers have. Today we have phishing scams where unscrupulous people try to access you credit card and bank details by pretending to be organisation that they are not. We have identity theft where they do all kinds of things in your name and even fake websites that just take your money and run. There are even viruses designed by computer programmers that are designed to get inside your hard drive, and send out all the data you have sitting there to some remote computer which extracts the useful bits.
Way back in the 1970's a computer programmer who worked for a major New York bank hatched a plan to make himself very rich. His plan was to steal a few cents from each one of the bank's customers and amass a fortune by doing this. It was a simple plan that he executed in several steps.
He wrote a computer program that rounded everybody's balance down to the nearest ten cents every month. He then had the program transfer the balance into the account which was alphabetically last on the list of customers. He opened an account for himself in the name of A. Zyglit and started building up his fortune.
Things went fine for a while and there were no hiccups, but a Polish man named Zyzov moved into the area and he opened an account at the same bank. After a few months he inquired at the bank because he seemed to be getting huge amounts of interest paid into his account and he was concerned about this.
Investigations at the bank exposed the scam and the programmer was imprisoned for a number of years.
If he had called himself Zyzyzyk when he opened that account, he might have got away with it. It just shows how a very small detail can be overlooked and upset the most carefully executed plans.
