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A gentleman in the southeast orange-growing state was caught and accused of mining cryptocurrency at work, according to the Tampa Bay Times:
TAMPA — A Department of Citrus employee was arrested after he used state computers to produce virtual currency for himself, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Matthew McDermott, 51, of Davenport was the information technology manager for the Florida Department of Citrus, the agency that oversees the state's citrus industry... [H]e used several computers in the Department of Citrus to mine for virtual currency, which include bitcoin and litecoin.
He wasn't just mining--he was allegedly really, really into it, to the tune of tens of thousands of Department of Citrus dollars:
Utility bills for the department jumped by more than 40 percent between October 2017 and January 2017, at a cost of about $825... McDermott also spent more than $22,000 using a state purchasing card between July and December, [buying] 24 graphic processing units, the FDLE said.
"Grand Theft" and "Official Misconduct" were his charges upon arrest. With bail set at just $5,000 (less than 1 BTC), he probably made bail pretty quickly.
It seems that mining cryptocurrency is the new en vogue temptation scandal.
Also at The Week, whose story mentions the previous incident at Russian nuclear facilities.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:08AM (7 children)
What about the people that print 'foreign jobs' on the company printer. Or borrow the company car for a weekend away. Or charge their phones/bikes/cars at work. Morning ablutions after you arrive at the office. And my all time favourite, taking a shit on company time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:26AM
Used to work in a team with a guy like that. Meeting Mick didn't like? Yeah, he's on the loo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @01:05PM (2 children)
Unfortunately that is the most productive thing some of these people do all day.
(Score: 3, Funny) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday March 15 2018, @01:30PM (1 child)
True story: A friend of mine was a mechanic working at a union shop. Some of the guys took advantage of union benefits and would slack off in various ways.
One guy would disappear to "go to the bathroom" for a couple hours during the day. He'd take magazines, crossword puzzles, books, etc. with him to the bathroom.
Some other guys were annoyed at him, so my friend gathered some pairs of old work boots, some works pants, and set up fake "guys in the restroom" in all the bathroom stalls. The lazy guy was really confused by it all for a day, since he couldn't find a place to waste time. (My friend shifted the boots etc. occasionally to make it believable. He himself would run to the bathroom when he saw the guy heading there, just to make some grunting and make it all look real.)
The next day my friend started having some fun with him (weirder noises etc.) -- culminating in two pairs of boots and pants in a single stall facing each other... Apparently freaked the guy out temporarily. Though he didn't know who played the prank. (IIRC, he tried calling a supervisor to come look in, but all the boots miraculous disappeared.)
After that, the guy stopped his long bathroom visits, though he found other ways to waste time of course.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 16 2018, @12:42AM
Where I work now, personal phones are strictly verboten. But going into the restrooms, because of the way the lighting is laid out you can see the shadows of forearms and thumbs twiddling phones cast across the floor, and you don't need to be creepy or nosey to see how obvious it is.
Although it's not my style to fuck off in the bathroom (or at all if I can avoid it, because the harder you work the faster the workday goes), I did have the peculiar habit of taking a section of newspaper from the break room and reading it as long as the kids were ready to be dropped off at the pool. The crinkle of turning the pages of a newspaper is a very distinctive and not so subtle sound, and even with others in there I didn't give a fuck. Since I preferred to shit like a king in the handicapped stall, I often left that section of newspaper draped neatly over the handrail after I was done so that people too poor to afford a data plan could have something to read.
It was a fun bit of trivia to see how long throughout the day the section of newspaper lasted in there. Providing hard-copy material to read at home for your shitting guests is one of those weird polite/unpolite things that even the most uptight prude won't hold against anybody.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Thursday March 15 2018, @03:19PM (2 children)
A couple foreign jobs on the printer are inexpensive and help serve to keep the worker in the work environment (even if not explicitly permitted). Anyone who makes $22875 worth of printing over the space of a few months is, on the other hand, stealing in the "grand theft" felony range.
Charging your bike, phone, laptop, flashlight, power tools, or car at work? Again, inexpensive things that help serve to keep the worker in the work environment (even if not explicitly permitted). Doesn't cost $22875 over the life of any single worker, or indeed any department full of workers.
That worker also costs incidental amounts on the power bill for things like lighting that reaches his eyes, heating or air conditioning that reaches his skin, and water that he drinks and that carries away his waste products. A few bucks to a few hundred bucks of this per worker is different in a fundamental way from $22875 of this per worker, even if it may be alike in other superficial ways.
Borrowing the company car can be more problematic, with laws against "taking without permission", but the expense is still upkeep of the car per mile times number of miles in the trip, arguably pretty small in the grand scheme of things. $22875 expenses in car-borrowing, on the other hand, more problematic. It's a matter of proportion.
Imo it's like the difference between someone walking across your yard vs. someone building a highway across your property. Sure, they're nominally alike, but there are differences that outweigh the similarities.
A car analogy may help. It's sort of like the difference between someone touching your car ("Hey! Get away from there!") and crushing your car for scrap ("Hey! That wasn't my car, was it?!"). One does not suck out significant value, but the other does.
I'm trying to make it sound simple, but I don't have all the answers. For example, I once worked for a state government agency at which members of an NGO/non-profit group used our government equipment to print all materials (foreign jobs indeed) for a conference their group regularly held in a state government building. I still haven't untangled that one.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @06:22PM
You need to go back to the old place.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 16 2018, @12:51AM
I've seen people print entire color booklets for things unrelated to work. Recreational groups associated with ladies, mostly, but most notably stuff from the Vietnamese guy who went crazy. He would print huge half-ream tomes of barely-Romanized moon-runes and with shifty eyes hold them tightly against his chest with both arms before scurrying them back to his workbench. Don't know why he had to call attention to himself like that given that the printer was at the center of the well-lit department where others were printing and headed over to the printer all the time. "Oh, hey Min Le Guc Dong, I think I got a redline drawing under that fat stack of yours. Mind handing it to me?"
Poor dude was an American sympathizer and later refugee who was thrown in a political prison by the NVA and told he was never going to be released for the rest of his life. Guess you can't just forget a thing like that.