After reportedly being influenced by the 1999 movie “Office Space,” a former software engineer of the US-based e-commerce website Zulily has been accused of stealing over $300k from the site.
According to a police report, Ermenildo Valdez Castro (28), allegedly changed the code of Zulily to redirect shipping charges to his own account, taking over $40,000 in products and nearly $260,000 in electronic payments.
He is expected to appear in court on January 26 after being accused on December 20 with two counts of theft and one case of identity theft.
The police report also noted that the scheme was referred to as the “OfficeSpace project” in a document that was found on Castro’s work laptop.
According to the report, he later admitted to naming his plan to steal from Zulily after the movie.
The report said that the 1999 movie shows office staff stealing modest amounts of cash by infecting the company’s banking system with a virus as payback for corporate downsizing and bad bosses.
In 2018, Castro was a member of Zulily’s shopping experience team, where she “had direct involvement in the coding of the client checkout process.”
Furthermore, the police investigation stated that he altered the code, but he claimed that Zulily was aware of it and that “it was part of a testing procedure,” according to the report.
