The Ultimate Remote Work Hack
To his colleagues at a top Silicon Valley firm, "Bob" was a model employee. He was quiet, met every deadline, and his code was clean and bug-free. He earned a salary of $150,000 a year and was regularly praised in performance reviews. But Bob had a secret. While his coworkers were grinding away in cubicles or home offices, Bob was browsing Reddit and watching cat videos. He hadn't written a single line of code in two years.
The scheme was ingeniously simple. Bob had secretly outsourced his entire job to a freelance developer. He found a brilliant teenager overseas in China who was willing to do the work for a fraction of the cost. Bob paid him roughly 10 an hour, amounting to about $20,000 a year. Bob pocketed the remaining $130,000 to do absolutely nothing.
"He mailed his RSA security token to China so the teen could log in as him. It was a security nightmare."
The scam unraveled in the most mundane way possible: greed. The teenager, realizing he was doing the work of a senior engineer for pennies, decided to email Bob's corporate account asking for a raise. Unfortunately for Bob, he was on vacation and had set up an auto-forward rule to his manager.
The IT department conducted a forensic audit and found that Bob's "work" was being submitted from an IP address in Shenyang, China, while Bob was physically logged into the building in California. He was fired immediately. The company is now auditing every remote employee, but Bob? Legend has it he's already applied for a new job—as a manager.
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