CNN
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A Washington state man was inspired by the 1999 cult movie “Office Space” to wire thousands of dollars from his employer into a personal account, a Seattle police arrest report has revealed.
Ermenildo Valdes Castro, 28, worked as a software engineer at online retailer Zulily from December 2018 until he was fired in June 2018, according to police.
“Beginning in the spring of 2022, Castro began editing Zulily’s software code so that he could steal it from the company,” the police report said.
According to police, Castro injected three types of malicious code into Zulily’s checkout process and used those methods to make “a total of $322,278.52 before being fired in June 2022.” stole it.”
Zulily’s fraud team was able to uncover a pattern of price adjustments for several products sold by the company. Police say these products were ordered by Castro and shipped to his residence.
According to the report, a OneNote document about Castro’s work laptop dubbed the “OfficeSpace Project” was found, outlining a “scheme for stealing shipping charges.”
The police report also notes that the plot of the movie “Office Space” revolves around an engineer who plans to transfer a few cents to his personal bank account.
Castro was contacted by police and arrested on June 21. In that interview, he “confirmed that he named his plan to steal from Zurily after the movie,” police said.
Castro also claimed that ordering and shipping more than 1,000 items to his home “was part of a testing process that Zurilly was aware of, but that there was a script that ran right after.” I did,” he told authorities. “Essentially cancel the order and prevent it from being processed,” the report said.
“He said test orders would have to be charged to a personal credit card, so the price of the product would need to be changed to avoid incurring large charges on the personal credit card. He said he forgot to run the script, so the order was shipped, he admitted that he had never notified Zlily staff that the order had been delivered. ‘ said the police report.
Castro also told police that he threw away many items after being fired.
“When asked why he didn’t return the items to Zurily, he said his opinion was ‘fuck it’ after they fired him,” the report said.
On December 20, King County prosecutor’s attorney Daniel Satterberg indicted Castro in the Washington Superior Court of King County for first-degree theft and first-degree identity theft.
As of Friday afternoon, the King County Superior Court Office website did not have a list of Castro’s attorneys.
