kottke.org

...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.

Micro-stealing

Do you remember the plot of of the Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta-Jones movie Entrapment? Where the last heist was predicated on using a computer glitch to extract tiny amounts of money from thousands of bank accounts? Some guy pulled something similar, and he's been indicted:

A California man has been indicted for an inventive scheme that allegedly siphoned $50,000 from online brokerage houses E-trade and Schwab.com in six months -- a few pennies at a time.

Michael Largent, of Plumas Lake, California, allegedly exploited a loophole in a common procedure both companies follow when a customer links his brokerage account to a bank account for the first time. To verify that the account number and routing information is correct, the brokerages automatically send small "micro-deposits" of between two cents to one dollar to the account, and ask the customer to verify that they've received it.

Update: The older precedent was, of course, the "salami technique" used in the stridently awful Superman 3. (thx, Bart!)

By Cliff Kuang    May 28, 2008 at 08:47 am

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