Conquer Club

The Story of a Man Who Outsourced His Work to China so He Could Watch Cat Videos All Day

The study documents the scam of a developer, who is referred to as Bob. He worked at a "critical infrastructure" company in the U.S. and started outsourcing his work to China underneath his company's nose, and would only pay those people less than one fifth of his six-figure salary.

Here's how it was possible.

Bob's company had started letting employees work remotely from home on certain days, so it set up a VPN concentrator to facilitate that. The company implemented two-factor authentication for the connection, with the second factor being a physical, rotating token RSA key fob. So all Bob had to do was send the key over to China via FedEx.

The company eventually noticed strange activity in its VPN logs, so it asked Verizon for some help understanding what was going on. The logs showed that Bob was logged in from Shenyang, China, even though he was sitting at his desk.

The company initially thought there was some kind of malware routing traffic from an internal connection in China, and then back to the U.S.

But Verizon investigators quickly noticed a major red flag. The VPN connection wasn't new and had been active for at least six months.

So they zeroed in on Bob himself, and took a forensic image of Bob's computer to recover as many files as possible and check for signs of malware.

What they ended up finding were hundreds of PDF invoices from a third-party contractor in Shenyang, China.

A look at his browsing history revealed what his typical work day consisted of:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos.
11:30 a.m. – Take lunch.
1:00 p.m. – Ebay time.
2:00ish p.m. – Facebook updates – LinkedIn.
4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.
5:00 p.m. – Go home.

So while workers in China were doing Bob's job for him, Bob was sitting back, relaxing, watching cat videos, and earning "several hundred thousand dollars" a year.

Dukasaur wrote:It's always made sense to me. Instead of waiting to be replaced by a robot, buy your own robot and replace yourself. I suppose this is just a natural variation on the same theme.

I don't see anything wrong with what this guy's doing. It's basic entrepreneurship.

BigBallinStalin wrote:

Dukasaur wrote:It's always made sense to me. Instead of waiting to be replaced by a robot, buy your own robot and replace yourself. I suppose this is just a natural variation on the same theme.

I don't see anything wrong with what this guy's doing. It's basic entrepreneurship.

I agree--assuming that the quality of work from the outsourced labor was at least equal to his own previous quality of work.

But even if that's true, do you think his entrepreneurial means were a bit... unfaithful to his contract?

Juan_Bottom wrote:This is hilarious. It makes me laugh because we don't have labor contracts anymore.

BigBallinStalin wrote:

Dukasaur wrote:It's always made sense to me. Instead of waiting to be replaced by a robot, buy your own robot and replace yourself. I suppose this is just a natural variation on the same theme.

I don't see anything wrong with what this guy's doing. It's basic entrepreneurship.

I agree--assuming that the quality of work from the outsourced labor was at least equal to his own previous quality of work.

But even if that's true, do you think his entrepreneurial means were a bit... unfaithful to his contract?

Baron Von PWN wrote:Bob should be given a promotion for fining a cost cutting measure for the compnay, or CEO should quietly outsource bobs department and get a massive raise for cutting costs.

AndyDufresne wrote:I just want to come clean, but during my reign as Community Manager I outsourced my job to an entire family from Guatemala. They were well taken care of and I think they did a real bang up job.

In regards to this story, I wonder how many people knew he was doing this before he was found it? I wonder if his family and friends knew, or if he kept everyone in the dark.


--Andy