A software engineer is accused of siphoning money into a personal account like the plot of the movie Office Space.
A former software engineer for online retailer Zulily has been accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his former employer, all of which is gone after he invested the stolen funds in GameStop stock options. Ermenildo “Ernie” Castro is the thief in question, and his chosen method of theft will sound familiar to anyone who has seen the movie Office Space and should prove fascinating to anyone following the drama of GameStop‘s stock.
In Office Space, Mike Judge’s classic comedy from 1999, three software engineers working dead-end jobs use software that siphons small amounts of money from every transaction their company makes into a personal account. Castro is facing counts of felony theft and felony identity theft for doing exactly that. Investigators allege he rewrote the code of Zulily’s checkout page to redirect small fractions of an order’s shipping fees into a personal account. Castro also allegedly changed the listed price on several products down to virtually nothing. He then bought the items for dirt cheap and had them shipped to his home, creating enormous, incredibly suspicious piles of Zulily packages. All of this was going on as GameStop stock became extremely volatile, an event that would soon cross into this bizarre story.
Zulily launched an investigation into the scheme shortly after it was set in motion in February 2022. Zulily sent employees to investigate the high volume of packages being delivered to Castro’s home and found the gigantic piles of Zulilly packages at his front doorstep. Castro told investigators that the packages were for a woman he met on Tinder. It was only after the plot began to unravel that the story’s wild GameStop stock connections come into play.
After the internal investigation, Castro was fired and had to turn in his work laptop. When his laptop was searched by Zulily employees, they found a document titled “OfficeSpace Project” in which Castro laid out his entire plan in intricate detail and even specifically cited Office Space as the inspiration for the theft. In total, Castro stole $302,278.52 from Zulily, not a dime of which he actually has anymore because he claims to have invested and lost all of it in GameStop stock options.
GameStop became a “meme stock” in recent years when the stock shot up from a few dollars a share to a record $81 in early 2021 before falling to $10 only days later. The stock rose and fell over the next year, but never broke out quite the way some investors hoped it would. One can only guess Castro invested his stolen money into GameStop stock options after the price spike assuming, as many investors did, that the price would once again skyrocket in the weeks and months ahead. It did not. GameStop‘s stock price has steadily declined since, with its price currently hovering at around $16 at the time of publication.
