Caught Out: Workers Spent Months Watching Cat Videos While Outsourcing His Work To China

It sounds like this guy was living the dream…

This software developer is believed to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay.

Meanwhile, he was outsourcing his daily work to a company in China and only paying them a fifth of his six-figure salary.

A security check on a US company revealed that one of its staff was outsourcing his work for the past few months.

Operator Verizon says the scam came to light after the US firm asked it for an audit, suspecting a security breach.

"This organisation had been slowly moving toward a more telecommuting oriented workforce, and they had therefore started to allow their developers to work from home on certain days. In order to accomplish this, they'd set up a fairly standard VPN concentrator approximately two years prior to our receiving their call," spokesperson Mr Valentine was quoted as saying.

The company had discovered the existence of an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang, China to the employee's workstation that went back months, Mr Valentine said.

"Central to the investigation was the employee himself, the person whose credentials had been used to initiate and maintain a VPN connection from China," said Mr Valentine.

The employee, an "inoffensive and quiet" but talented man versed in several programming languages, "spent less than one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him", Mr Valentine said.

"Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day," he added.

"Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about $50,000 (€37,500) annually."

The employee no longer worked at the firm, Mr Valentine said.