The American workforce has been hammered by companies shipping jobs overseas to save money. One man turned that trend on its head, however, by finding someone in China to do his job secretly on the side.
A software developer, reportedly in his 40s, sent his work assignments to China and spent his days goofing off on the Web. Outsourcing was well worth his time. He continued receiving his six-figure salary and paid only a fifth of that to a company in Shenyang.
It took a while for his company to figure out the scam. People there started seeing some odd connections to the corporate network from China and immediately thought they were under attack from Chinese hackers. They called Verizon (VZ -0.44%) for help.
Verizon's risk team explains the issue on its website. The company had been slowly allowing more workers to telecommute, and it gave developers permission to work from home on certain days, writes Verizon's Andrew Valentine. The company began monitoring network access logs and was shocked to find an open and active connection to the network from Shenyang.
Those records showed the employee logged in from China, Valentine wrote, "yet the employee is right there, sitting at his desk, staring into his monitor." Verizon investigators found that the daily connections from Shenyang had been going on for months. They began questioning the employee, and pretty soon the facts came out.
Company executives were surprised because the employee seemed like such a quiet, hard-working fellow. He was a family man, inoffensive and "someone you wouldn't look at twice in an elevator," Valentine wrote.
So what does the workday look like when you've sent all your work to China? Here's how the employee filled the hours, according to Verizon:
9 a.m. -- Get into work. Surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos.
11:30 a.m. -- Go to lunch.
1 p.m. -- Start surfing around on eBay.
2 p.m. -- Update status on Facebook. Check in with LinkedIn.
4:30 p.m. -- Send an end-of-day update email to management.
5 p.m. -- Go home.
It looked like the man was running the same scam at several companies, Verizon wrote. He was earning several hundred thousand dollars a year and paid the Chinese company about $50,000 annually.
And he was known as one of the company's best workers. Valentine explains:
The best part? Investigators had the opportunity to read through his performance reviews while working alongside HR. For the last several years in a row he received excellent remarks. His code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building.
