Software Engineer Charged Ermenildo Castro, aged 28, of Tacoma, gave an official statement to the detectives that the theft was inspired by the 90’s movie “Office Space”
The thief Engineer made a plan to divert customer fees from his employer, Zulily.com, into his own bank accounts. The court documents give the full detail of the event. According to the official reports, Engineer Castro wrote software code that manipulated the online retailer’s checkout page to send the shipping fees into his own account. The total charges acquired by Castro were a sum of $260,000 in stolen shipping fees.
What they say is right, for being even a good thief you need to be an intelligent thief. Manipulating his powers of being a good Software Engineer, Castro Castro also changed prices on Zulily to purchase approximately $41,000 in merchandise for ‘pennies on the dollar’. In total, Zulily’s team said Castro had sent over 1,000 items to his house.
As the Seattle police further investigated, they found out that the ‘OfficeSPACE project’ titled document in Castro’s laptop outlined Castro’s scheme to ‘cleanup evidence’ by manipulating audit logs and disabling alarm logging.
Beginning in February the theft lasted March until the company had discovered discrepancies in the shipping fees being charged to customers, an SPD report states. Castro himself was one of the team members assigned to investigate the issue.
Even Elon Musk found the news amusing as he tweeted:-
Originally, Superman III https://t.co/nv4AQ5oa7T
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 30, 2022
