Sneaky web developers and IT outsourcing don’t go together

IT outsourcing is a common practice in the west. However, some have taken advantage of labor with fraudulence.

Outsourcing is an approach done by American, European and other big corporations where they get contractors from other countries to do the same type of work at a lesser price than their home-based workers.

Normally, qualified contractors come from countries in Asia like India, China, Philippines and Singapore.

Outsourcing is an effective tool for companies because they can get a lot of work done at a lesser price. One developer used this approach and outsourced his own job to a company in China and never got caught until recently.

Outsourcing To China

This program developer was hired as a work-at-home employee and was provided a virtual personal network (VPN) that uses a two-factor authentication process so that he can access the company’s network in the comforts of his own home. In addition to this, the work-at-home program developer needs to enter a special number given by the RSA SecureID key fob as their sign on tool so they can start doing their work.

This is necessary for payroll purposes. It determines what time the employee signed on to work and what time he signed off to end his day. What this sneaky program developer did was send his fob information to the Chinese based company and discussed additional details about the work via RingCentral business VoIP. When the work day starts, the Chinese contractors enter the fob information and what the company sees back home is he’s signed in and doing his job. He pays the Chinese developers a fraction of his salary.

More Time, More Money

While everybody in his company thinks he is working, this program developer spent most of his time watching videos online, checking web auction listings and updating his social network page. When his work is completed, he submits it to his company under his name. When the plan works, it’s now time to get additional work from another source. He contracted two more companies as a program developer.

Leveraging Time

He contracted several web developing projects and outsourced them all to China. Thanks to the high quality skill of the Chinese program developers that he hired, he aced his performance review and was considered to be one of the best programmers in the company. He got all the rewards and praises while the outsourced contractors got a small portion of his monthly income.

Something Fishy

One thing that his company noticed is that logins that are registering under this developer’s name were coming from China. The IT people checking this out didn’t have the slightest idea that their colleague was outsourcing his own work-at-home projects. Initially, they thought it was just a malware that’s initiating the VPN to connect through a proxy server, which reroutes the Internet traffic to China and back to the US Company. They came up with complicated explanations but never considered the simplest idea at all that someone was logging in under the developer’s name in China.

A Foiled Plan

The issue got elevated to a higher department, which made a thorough investigation of the issue. That’s the only time they found out that their ace developer wasn’t doing any job, and was just outsourcing his work to someone else. This employee made several hundred thousand dollars in a year and only paid $50,000 to his outsourced company.

Cheaters Never Win

He succeeded in fooling his company and in return he was able to generate employment in a third world country. The small amount he paid out put food on his contractor’s tables. Nevertheless, he was cheating and needed to be punished for it. He lost his employment as a developer and at the same time, tarnished his credibility.

About the author:

Henry Conrad is a 29-year-old game developer from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Aside from gaming and being a tech junky, he also dabbles in creative writing, which allows him to create great story-lines and backgrounds for his characters. . Follow him on Twitter or join him in Google +.