The former employee is accused of stealing over $300,000 from the site after being inspired by the movie Office Space. According to a police report, Ermenildo Castro, 28, is accused of manipulating product prices and altering the company's code to divert shipping fees to a personal account.
According to court documents, Castro was able to steal $260,000 in electrical payments by editing the software code for checkout payments at Zulily, which allowed him to divert shipping fees from customer purchases to a Stripe account that he controlled.
Three methods were accused of being used by him.
(1) an original code that diverted some customer shipping costs from Zulily’s account to Castro’s personal account beginning on February 28, 2022, through which Castro unlawfully obtained $110,240.71 from Zulily;
(2) after Zulily began investigating that first issue, a replacement code that doublecharged a small percentage of Zulily customers for shipping, allowing Castro to route a ‘full’ shipping cost to both Zulily’s accounts and his own account, through which Castro unlawfully obtained $151,645.50 from customers; and
(3) unrelated to the first two issues, by reducing the cost of expensive items that he was purchasing on Zulily.com to pennies per unit, a method by which he unlawfully obtained $40,842.31 from Zulily. Through these three methods, Castro stole a combined $302,278.52 before he was terminated in June 2022.
Castro was going to use the stolen funds to live off the grid.
Castro worked as a software engineer. Castro was fired after the company investigated his scheme. A note that Castro would need to "fudge exposure metrics" was found in a OneNote file on Castro's work computer. Castro was arrested on June 21st and told detectives that he planned to steal from Zulily after seeing the movie.
The plot of Office Space centers around a group of software engineers who use a computer virus to steal huge sums of money from their employer by skimming fractions of pennies from company transactions after being inspired by a similar scheme from the 1983 SupermanIII movie.
Castro planned to live off the grid if his scheme was discovered, according to information found on the "OfficeSpace Project" file.
Castro told authorities that the money had been invested in the stock market and that he had diverted the shipping fees.
Castro was able to purchase over 1,000 items of Zulily merchandise for just $250 because he altered the prices of the products.
Castro admitting to placing orders for over 1,000 items that were shipped to his house. He stated that the orders were part of a testing process that Zulily was aware about, but he claimed that there was a script that was to be run shortly thereafter that would essentially cancel the order and ensure the orders did not process. He said the test orders would have to be billed to a personal credit card, thus his changing of the items’ prices, as to avoid incurring a large expense on his personal credit card. He said he forgot to run the script; therefore, the orders shipped. He admitted that he did not ever notify Zulily staff of the orders being delivered. When asked what he did with the items delivered, he stated that once he was fired, he threw many of the items away.
When asked why he never returned the items to Zulily, he said that once they fired him, his opinion was, “Fuck ‘em.”
Castro is charged with two counts of theft and one count of identity theft and is scheduled to appear in court on January 26th.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
