May 29, 2008

Looking after the pennies

There is that saying where looking after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. Well one man in the US did just that and has allegedly fleeced banks out of $50,000 a few cents at a time.

Anyone who has opened up a PayPal account will know that they deposit a small amount into your account to verify that the account is yours, you confirm the amount and you are then up and running.

But Michael Largent from California thought that this would be a good way of making some extra cash. He used a script which automatically opened 58,000 brokerage accounts which were linked to accounts with online banks.

The tiny deposits built up, he even managed to swindle the Google Checkout service out of over eight thousand dollars too.

Source [Wired]