9. Guy Attempts The Same Method Of Fraud - Office Space
Office Space tells the lovely story of a group of down-on-their-luck office works who attempt to rip off the company they work for with an ingenious plan: they steal fractions of pennies using a computer program to amount interest over a long period of time. The amount being stolen is so small, of course, that nobody is likely to notice it. Only it goes wrong, and they end up withdrawing way, way too much. So, of course, somebody decided to try this sh*t in real life. And they would have gotten away with it, too, had it not been for those... well, actually, no, they just wouldn't have gotten away with it. The culprit was one Michael Largent, a 22-year-old who ran a scheme almost identical to the one featured in the movie. He used a program that opened 58,000 individual accounts with online brokerage firms, which - as protocol - deposited tiny denominations of money as confirmation each and every time a new account got opened. $50,000 dollars later the FBI caught on and poor Michael got sent to jail.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
