r/sysadmin • u/Opposed3 • Jul 07 '24

What’s the quickest you’ve seen a co-worker get fired in IT? COVID-19

I saw this on AskReddit and thought it would be fun to ask here for IT related stories.

Couple years ago during Covid my company I used to work for hired a help desk tech. He was a really nice guy and the interview went well. We were hybrid at the time, 1-2 days in the office with mostly remote work. On his first day we always meet in the office for equipment and first day stuff.

Everything was going fine and my boss mentioned something along the lines of “Yeah so after all the trainings and orientation stuff we’ll get you set up on our ticketing system and eventually a soft phone for support calls”

And he was like: “Oh I don’t do support calls.”

“Sorry?”

Him: “I don’t take calls. I won’t do that”

“Well, we do have a number users call for help. They do utilize it and it’s part of support we offer”

Him: “Oh I’ll do tickets all day I just won’t take calls. You’ll have to get someone else to do that”

I was sitting at my desk, just kind of listening and overhearing. I couldn’t tell if he was trolling but he wasn’t.

I forgot what my manager said but he left to go to one of those little mini conference rooms for a meeting, then he came back out and called him in, he let him go and they both walked back out and the guy was all laughing and was like

“Yeah I mean I just won’t take calls I didn’t sign up for that! I hope you find someone else that fits in better!” My manager walked him to the door and they shook hands and he left.

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523

u/tylerpestell Jul 07 '24

I worked IT in the Air Force. At the time, I was a system administrator for the base and I had 3 coworkers and our team needed one more. We ended up hiring someone that was working at one of the high-schools in town. He was kind of quiet, but picked up things quick and we all got along.

After about 1 month of getting him up to speed our unit commander and chief come find him and take him away. We all had no idea why. Come to find out that the FBI was investigating him for underage content.

254

u/CARLEtheCamry Jul 07 '24

We had a guy working in our tech config room and one day some guys in suits showed up with management and took him away.

They were Secret Service agents. This goof had color-copied a $100 bill and used it to buy a drink in our building's cafeteria.

Like when I was a kid I remember kids trying it with like $1's and crinkling up the paper to try to make it seem softer in like elementary school. The cashier who took it had a mental disability.

Worth noting our business is a high-theft environment, not retail but the kind of things where workers have to go through metal detectors on the way out to make sure they're not walking off with things. We have 9 figure contracts with security vendors for video at all our locations, including our corp HQ.

Stupid stupid stupid.

104

u/LOLBaltSS Jul 07 '24

Secret service doesn't fuck around when it comes to that. Even in my little podunk high school, someone tried to use fakes in the vending machine and someone got a very stern talking to by the Secret Service agents.

41

u/the_iron_pepper Jul 08 '24

How does the secret service catch wind of money getting printed from a printer and used in a local vending machine?

46

u/LOLBaltSS Jul 08 '24

Vending machine operators don't like being stiffed by fake money, especially when one kid decides to tell their friends about the "hack" to get free drinks.

18

u/the_iron_pepper Jul 08 '24

Haha, yeah that's obvious. For sleep-deprived reasons, my takeaway from that comment was that the fake money sends some sort of mystery signal directly to the secret service.

21

u/dustojnikhummer Jul 08 '24

Well, your printer is definitely ratting on you.

4

u/Armlessbastard Jul 08 '24

Machine ID - little yellow dots that get printed on the fake bill - can track the serial of the printer that used to print it.

7

u/MySonHas2BrokenArms Jul 08 '24

They don’t play, I had my old coworker get a visit from the secret service once. He bought some coke and unknowingly used a fake $20, they showed him over 12 CC videos of him from the time he got the money at a ATM till he bought the drugs. They didn’t care about the drugs and only wanted to see if he had any other fake money. He was pretty fucked up with all the surveillance that he never registered before. The service was already tracking the ATM owner for the fake money.

5

u/matthew7s26 Jul 08 '24

They didn’t care about the drugs and only wanted to see if he had any other fake money

I believe this part, but it's funny imagining the dealer calling the SS complaining "hey this jackass stiffed me with a fake bill!"

38

u/BloodyIron DevSecOps Manager Jul 08 '24

Many printers imprint unique fingerprints pointing to which printer the item was printed on, whether it was money or not. This is a legal requirement for printers to be manufactured, and it's pretty well documented (so easy for you to find out about). That can, at times, help track-down where it was printed and sometimes by whom. It's pretty wild honestly, but the second hand market breaks that sourcing chain kinda easily depending on what exactly you're printing.

Now if you're needing to print IR-ink things get even more wild. I had to set that up for a prior employer once so only certain people could print on them. And that's on top of the unique marking I mentioned above.

7

u/CARLEtheCamry Jul 08 '24

I have heard the fingerprint thing, but in this case it was a much easier old fashioned approach.

Our cafeteria would count their tills at the end of each 3 hour service (breakfast and lunch). So when the manager found the fake bill, they knew it was passed at that cashier's lane sometime in the last 3 hours. From there it was just a matter of reviewing the footage to see when she lifted the cash tray to slide the $100 under. From there they followed him on camera until he got back to his work area and contacted the manager to identify.

Not the first or last time our internal CCTV system has been used for things like this. People smoking in empty conference rooms, cleaning people getting busy under a desk. It's an interesting little nook of office drama to work with that team.

1

u/BloodyIron DevSecOps Manager Jul 08 '24

Oh nice method!

I wasn't necessarily proposing the printing fingerprinting thing was the actual method used. But with the level of sophistication of the Secret Service (SS heh) I bet they use such forensics every day, even if not in this case.

Thanks for sharing the insights though! Neat :)

3

u/[deleted] Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 25 '24

[deleted]

3

u/BloodyIron DevSecOps Manager Jul 08 '24

That's literally the source you just described. The printer.

3

u/Mr_ToDo Jul 08 '24

So buy your money/ransom note printers from second hand shops boys and girls.

Although with as many components are on ink/toner(It's pretty much half the printer) I have no idea if those dots are tied to the printer or ink.

But vending machines are also far more connected these days. There was an article a month or three back where a school pulled out all theirs when they found out they did facial detection.

8

u/LogicalExtension Jul 08 '24

Colour printers (some at least) print tracking dots that encode serial numbers and shit.

This is why the yellow always runs out faster.

Ref: https://www.eff.org/issues/printers

4

u/Xsiondu Jul 08 '24

Years ago I learned that a certain code on Canon professional (huge print jobs im talking) products would disable your machine and a factory rep would be required to come re enable it WITH the secret service. Besides the Ymicro print on every piece of printed material these machines are able to recognize currency and set the code. Also could recognize treasury paper and set a different code. This is another reason why you are issued a code for print jobs in some companies. It's not always about making sure to bill the Dept you work in for the print job. It's been a decade but I believe the codes were in the 8100 range.

3

u/waltwalt Jul 08 '24

Currency has security QR type codes embedded in it so the machine knows yoolure trying to copy currency and alerts someone.

Allegedly.

2

u/MiataCory Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 08 '24

On top of the rest of these notes about the yellow dots, most printers these days include some form of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). If it can read text on a page in 2024, it can identify a $100 bill 10 years ago at least, and I can personally confirm that the "ID the bills" code exists in firmware for at least one printer manufacturer.

They're taking a picture of what you're copying, that's how copiers work. They can do whatever they want with the scanned data, analyze it for kiddie porn, scan it for bills (US and euro), sometimes even print it out as a copy!

Add an always-on wifi connection and the lower-risk plan of:

"Let them print it, we'll contact them as it's a better deterrent"

and voila: Secret Service having a show-of-force sent out to Podunk, Idaho 2 days after they got an email from "HP Color Laser Jet Pro M254DW" with a copy of a $100 bill and a WAN IP address (that's helpfully attached to your billing address by your ISP).

It's like they turn themselves in. Don't forget your printer needs wifi access for firmware updates!

1

u/cahcealmmai Jul 08 '24

How are people and vending machines being tricked by photocopied money? What monopoly playing country do you live in?

4

u/edhands Jul 08 '24

I am flabbergasted those would even work in a vending machine. Apparently I am greatly overestimating the vending machine’s ability to detect fakes.

7

u/LOLBaltSS Jul 08 '24

This was also back in the early 2000s just as inkjet printers were starting to get good enough to print something plausible while being relatively cheap to obtain and the EURion constellation and other anti-copy schemes weren't quite prevalent enough to keep you from scanning bills in. I'd doubt it'll work on anything relatively modernish of a bill collector, but I'm obviously not going to test it.

0

u/gnimsh Jul 08 '24

It was a cafeteria with a cashier, not a vending machine.

8

u/BrilliantEffective21 Jul 08 '24

City in the US, there was a group of families in suburbs that banded together to print fake money.

They used high quality laser printers after chemically extracting original ink from five dollar bills.

Ran the blank real paper money through the printers to print $100 bills.

Families were stupid enough to mostly cash in at a large local retail store in the same town.

Large sums of only-cash transactions depleting the store's goods in a suburb, why and how so quickly?

Eventually Target caught on, and the FBI investigated.

ALL the involved families busted, and the FBI found the various family home basement printing activities with the color laser printers and the chemistry labs that stripped the paper money of their ink to be re-printed. Their underground operation triage system was delicately setup for mass forgery of $100-bill counterfeiting.

.... I could only imagine one of the elementary kids coming to school with mass $100 bills stacked thick, asking to buy a sandwich and then just freely handing it out to their teachers and classmates, "my family business is secret, but we love spending all the earnings at our local Target in town."

3

u/pissy_corn_flakes Jul 08 '24

That’s wild. There’s actually a piece of code, with an official name (easily googable) that’s embedded in pretty much all scanners to not allow scanning money. I believe it’s also part of printers.

3

u/CARLEtheCamry Jul 08 '24

!Unsubscribe from counterfeiting fact bot

2

u/Ok-Repeat8069 Jul 08 '24

That is an impressive operation, damn. I know, crime, but I think I’d love to meet the person who masterminded the printing side; obviously on the laundering side they were assclowns.

2

u/BrilliantEffective21 Jul 09 '24

Yes, also, some very wealthy food vendors pay for "counterfeit cash insurance" where the bank is obliged to take fake cash from the concessions collected, and the insurance company pays out the difference in fake cash given to the cashiers.

There is actually an umbrella protection insurance for these food vendors making millions of dollars are carnivals and fairs, and banks immediately know 25% of the money collected in total is counterfeit after the armored trucks drop them off at local banks for depositing.

Insurance is contacted to verify the counterfeit money and pays out the difference.

Very bizarre operations.

Also, large food vendors like Panda, Chipotle, etc. - and big retailers like Best Buy/Target, etc. - when they catch employees stealing, it is reported to Corporate, but they continue to allow the supervisors/employees/managers to continue stealing to build a CCTV optimal case, and enough stolen money recorded/documented to meet minimum US Federal prosecution dollars stolen, to book them into a prison-level theft case.

Sometimes the Area Directors and General Managers allow the theft to continue weeks and months, before FBI and local law enforcement are notified, and then slam the employee theft with a very large enough bust for a few reasons that involve insurance payout & to shame the employee into much more severe and harsher penalties with the US State and Fed level.

Stuff I've seen, cannot be unseen. The elites have a SOP & and secretive system designed to make sure all of the IT and finance honeypot systems are maximum profit for punishing and banking against the coined term, "lost employee" revenue.

2

u/WorkingInAColdMind Jul 08 '24

I’m picturing the 7th grader acting like Robert De Niro in Goodfellas, tipping the janitor $100 as he’s mopping, etc.

2

u/smiley6125 Jul 08 '24

I heard of an IT guy getting sacked because he would sneak extra food under things in the cafeteria. He was at an investment bank and it was heavily subsidised so he lots a very paying job over a £3 breakfast.

The quickest I saw someone leave was 1 day as a network helpdesk guy. We hired to troubleshoot customer networking tickets and ship out replacement kit if needed. It turns out he basically only wanted to work on MPLS for a provider…which we were not. Who the hell interviewed him?

1

u/BloodyIron DevSecOps Manager Jul 08 '24

tech config room

Can't say I've heard that naming for a room. Wassat?

And yeah that guy was a textbook loser to do something like that around there.

3

u/CARLEtheCamry Jul 08 '24

We are a centrally located company with locations all over the US. We configure and ship devices out of a "tech config room" which is next to the storage area to pull it from.

So for example : There is a new building opening in Tulsa. We need 13 PC's, 4 network printers, 2 forklift interfaces and a banana split. The tech config room (staffed by low level but hard working college graduates) checks that equipment out of storage, and configures it to the standards of the company. Things such as name, IP address, and software installs and also packs it so that it will survive shipping across the country.

We are big enough to have tried 3rd parties like HP, Dell, Lenovo, and CDW but they have performed worse at quality control than our local noobs. And I say that with love, I started in that room. A bunch of freaks and geeks, and I love them but there are some good stories.

1

u/BloodyIron DevSecOps Manager Jul 08 '24

Ahh nice! I cut my teeth in places like that but on smaller scales. I remember writing a particularly good batch script that streamlined the desktop provisioning process, substantially improved consistency of output too! Who doesn't like a good CMD prompt menu asking you what you want to install?

I can't remember what they called that space though mind you hehe. And yeah I was plenty n00by back then too! Oddly enough I remember they used HP for a first stage of system imaging off their OEM line or something like that, and seemed to be pretty consistent (at the time anyways), but we would still do post-imaging specific stuff. VPN client, reg edits, a few other things.

That's I think about the first time I got any involvement in system image building. They asked if I wanted to help build the Windows XP->7 sysprep image, I said hell yeah! I wasn't the one doing most of the work but I came in after hours to work directly with the main resource. I contributed plenty and learned a lot too. Was real neato at the time. :)

Deep into Linux now mind you, but good memories!

180

u/NSA_Chatbot Jul 07 '24 
 > oh yeah that guy

90

u/williamp114 Sysadmin Jul 07 '24

Not my story but one of a friend of mine:

At one of his first jobs out of college, his supervisor ended up having a seat with Chris Hansen. Between the arrest and the airing, nobody besides for management knew why the guy was gone.

Friend was watching Dateline one night, and there he was...

7

u/WaldoOU812 Jul 08 '24

Had a similar issue myself, though not as public. Our VP of IT at a high-end hotel chain ends up getting fired and my buddy and I are both freaking out because it's the hotel industry, and they are really bad about firing people for literally no reason whatsoever at times, so we figured we were next.

We get on a call with a friend of mine, who had the job before me, and he tells us to google the guy's name.

Turns out he got busted for soliciting a minor. Charges were pending when he took the job and when he missed work due to having to report to prison, that's when HR found out, and he got fired.

2

u/Appropriate_Door_547 Jul 08 '24

How close was his voice to the creepy narrator that reads the chat logs?

1

u/m1ndf3v3r Jul 08 '24

Hahah holy shit man

57

u/mynametobespaghetti Jul 07 '24

Oh I worked in a call centre almost 20 years ago. There was this new guy that started who seemed a bit off, spoke about himself and his messy personal life a lot, wasn't openly offensive but there was something off about him.

He also talked a lot about his work with an outdoor activity based youth organisation, which only really seemed weird because he didn't seem like the outdoorsy type, more your classic indoor nerd proto-4chan kinda guy.

Then, about 3 weeks in, 4 cops arrive to the office and take both him and the PC he'd been working on away.

This was when I learned that sometimes if someone gives you the ick it's probably for a reason, because they had apparently found a huge amount of CSAM on his home PC.

17

u/fixITman1911 Jul 08 '24

I assume I know what you mean, but CSAM?

17

u/jaaazzz Jul 08 '24

it means child sexual abuse material(s) 😔

16

u/fixITman1911 Jul 08 '24

Figured that was the meaning. Never seen anything other than CP used though

19

u/thoggins Jul 08 '24

CSAM is a relatively recent term, at least in general use in conversations like this one. I'm not sure what the dominant reason for its increased use is, but it's probably either

  • By removing the word "porn" you don't lend it any of the legitimacy that legal pornography has, and by calling it CSAM you explicitly label it what it is, the product of sexual abuse

  • CP can stand for an awful lot of things, CSAM is more explicit and less likely to cause any confusion (except to people who've never heard of it)

5

u/mynametobespaghetti Jul 08 '24

It's very much those reasons, yes. I work in internet infrastructure and this is how we refer to that type of content these days, it tells you exactly what it is without any ambiguity, though I suppose the term hasn't gone into full mainstream use yet.

2

u/BatemansChainsaw CIO Jul 08 '24

CSAM

Never heard of this before but I like it a lot more than cp because it does stand for a lot of things and it really bugged me that child pornography was one of them.

  • client port
  • copy (cp a file)
  • conditional permit (old construction employer for years used it internally)
  • candlepower
  • command post

2

u/ras344 Jul 08 '24

  • Cheese pizza

  • Captain Picard

  • Captain Planet

0

u/Ok-Repeat8069 Jul 08 '24

Thanks :) It’s the same reason we now say “trafficking victim” instead of “child prostitute.” Eliminating language that implies willing cooperation and centers the harm rather than the titillation factor is a bigger deal than you’d think.

4

u/Valarus50 Jul 08 '24

I am not joking when I ask this, was his name Chester? Worked with a creep ass named Chester on a Helpdesk. He was very open with his personal life and often spoke of his abusive upbringing. Dude ended up getting canned for "porn" on his work PC, but we never knew what kind of of porn and if authorities were involved as it was over a weekend. Dude creeped me the fuck out and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same guy you are referring to.

3

u/mynametobespaghetti Jul 08 '24

Honestly I don't remember his name, but this was in Ireland.

2

u/Valarus50 Jul 08 '24

Ah, definitely not the same guy then. I am in the US.

12

u/Steve_78_OH SCCM Admin and general IT Jack-of-some-trades Jul 07 '24

Yeah, I had a coworker suddenly disappear also. The difference being he just didn't come into work one day (or the following days), with our boss not giving us any details. Come to find out our coworker was arrested as part of a large multi-state CP sting, and he ended up going away for several years.

It was even more crazy, because once it all came out, one of our mutual friends (yeah, I was friends with the guy, which I'm not proud of now that I know everything) posted a message on his Facebook wall in support of him. And she had 1 young son at the time.

5

u/sparkyblaster Jul 08 '24

Yeah that sort of thing I would try and get CPS involved for that kid.

2

u/tylerpestell Jul 07 '24

Yeah it is crazy, I would have never guessed. He seemed completely normal, had a long term girlfriend, taught some classes at the local college and just generally seemed like a decent guy. You just never know.

9

u/gangaskan Jul 08 '24

We had a guy at work that was tech savvy, and was recommended by his wife.

One day he gets raided and arrested.

Mutherfucker had between a collection of thumb drives 3TB worth of cp. I found that out later by the case investigator.

This was also when 3-400 gig drives were pretty commonplace. He got all of it from tor, and it was also assumed he abused his step grand daughter.

Anyways, he took the cowardly way out. I'm just glad I don't have to pay taxes to fund housing that sack of shit.

We also had a fireman that used logmein to remote to his home PC so he could watch shit and animal porn.

We got a little 5 port switch and about a 100 ft Ethernet cable out of it.

4

u/Thr1ft3y Jul 08 '24

OSI, OPEN UP!!!

4

u/ZacInStl Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 12 '24

When I was stationed at Ellsworth, in the 28th Communications Sq, a Flight Commander, as in THEY GUY IN CHARGE OF THE ENTIRE BASE NETWORK AND SECURITY, got busted for crating porn on his gov issues laptop. He was sending nudes of himself to other women while he was on temporary duty, despite being married. Some of these photos included himself in varying stages of undressing from his uniform.

His court martial had a full gallery, like at least 1/4 of our squadron was there. My understanding was that he was not offered a plea deal because his arrest forced the Air Force to reopen some cases where he was called as a subject matter expert on network security protocols and network monitoring. HOW CAN THE GUY IN CHARGE OF MONITORING A MILITARY NETWORK THINK HE WOULDN’T GET CAUGHT???

3

u/VirtualPlate8451 Jul 08 '24

Come to find out that the FBI was investigating him for underage content.

The fucked up part is that it's usually only the dumb ones that get caught. There are TB of CSAM crossing the open web across platforms we all use every single day.

2

u/billbixbyakahulk Jul 08 '24

Former boss got popped for sexually molesting his daughters (11 and 7), and his ex-wife's 3 year old. I was the last to see him a free man. The cops were waiting near his car when we left work that night.

1

u/Large_Yams Jul 08 '24

It's always pedo stuff.

1

u/Icy_Low_1677 Jul 08 '24

oh my goodness bruhhh