James's Weblog

There was an incident at Sony last summer where someone was fired for stealing equipment from work and selling it on eBay. Apparently he sold:

• complete systems built with parts from testing machines
• device accessories (PDA cradles, notebook docking stations) that had been lying around in quantity
• pirated DVDs that he copied with company equipment

I don’t know the exact details to how he was caught, but the rumor was that he sold a pre-production unit of an old model, that the buyer took it to a service center for repair, and that the service center identified it and discovered the shenanigans.

Sony’s security department monitored him (and probably everyone else) for a while and uncovered his other auctions. After security collected enough evidence, management finally clued the rest of us in on what was going down and on his imminent termination. That night, an eBay user named “sonysecurity” was the high bidder on one of his auctions.

The next day, he was curiously absent from work. (They did find him eventually.)

Several other people involved with him also were fired shortly afterward.