Police: Thief used computer code to steal from employer in ‘Office Space’-style scheme

Police in Seattle are accusing a man of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his employer using a scheme adopted from a classic late 1990s comedy movie.

Ermenildo Valdez Castro allegedly “stole a combined $302,278.52” from the online retailer Zulily before his scam was discovered, the Seattle Police Department alleged in a police report this week. 

Castro reportedly pulled off the heist by rerouting small sums of money from Zulily transactions into a bank account. The scam allegedly took place from the spring through the summer of 2022. 

Files on Castro’s computer explicitly made reference to the movie “Office Space,” a 1999 Mike Judge-directed comedy in which the protagonists engineer similar coding to take many fractions of a cent from their tech firm employer over the course of several years. 

Notably, in that film, the code performs incorrectly, ripping the company off of over $300,000 in a matter of days—an amount roughly equal to that allegedly stolen by Castro in his own scheme.