The 1999 dark comedy Office Space is set in a company called Initech, in which insecure programmer Peter Gibbons hates the company, and his two best friends are colleagues Michael Bolton and Samir Nagheenanajar, who both hate Initech. When Peter finds out that two close friends are facing layoffs, the three of them hatch a plan to plant a virus in the banking system that transfers a few cents of every financial transaction to Peter’s account. However Michael made a decimal point error in the software and they moved over $300,000. In order to avoid going to jail, the three tried their best to solve the problem. Finally an accident happened. But in real life, overly dramatic surprises are less likely to happen. Ermenildo Castro, a 28-year-old programmer, admitted that he developed a plan to steal money from the account of his employer, Zulily.com, based on the plot of the film. He wrote software that rigged Zulily’s checkout page to divert shipping costs for each transaction to individual accounts. Court documents say he stole $260,000 in shipping fees. Ermenildo Castro also used his position as a software engineer to manipulate the price of Zulily merchandise, buying $41,000 worth of merchandise for pennies, police allege. His activities started in February, and by March, the company found that there was a problem with the freight. Investigators eventually uncovered Castro’s plan and found a file on his laptop called the “OfficeSpace project,” outlining his plan to clean up evidence by manipulating audit logs and disabling alert logs. Investigators went to his home and found the front door and driveway piled high with merchandise.
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