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!)