Salami slicing

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Salami slicing is a series of many minor actions, often performed by clandestine means, that together results in a larger action that would be difficult or illegal to perform at once. The term is typically used pejoratively.

An example of salami slicing, also known as penny shaving, is the fraudulent practice of stealing money repeatedly in extremely small quantities, usually by taking advantage of rounding to the nearest cent (or other monetary unit) in financial transactions. It would be done by always rounding down, and putting the fractions of a cent into another account. The idea is to make the change small enough that any single transaction will go undetected.^[1][2]

In information security, a salami attack is a series of minor attacks that together results in a larger attack. Computers are ideally suited to automating this type of attack.

In politics, the term salami tactics has been used since the 1940s to refer to a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition.

In academia, salami slicing refers to the practice of creating several publications out of material that could have been published in a single journal or review. (See also least publishable unit).

Contents 1 Salami slicing attacks 2 In fiction 2.1 Film and television 2.2 Music 2.3 Literature 3 See also 4 External links 5 References

[edit] Salami slicing attacks

In 2008 a man was arrested for fraudulently creating 58,000 accounts which he used to collect money through verification deposits from online brokerage firms a few cents at a time.^[3] The reason he was prosecuted was not due to the number of accounts or verification deposits he had, but rather that he opened the accounts with obviously false names of cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Charlie Brown.

In Los Angeles in October 1998, the district attorneys charged four men with fraud for allegedly installing computer chips in gasoline pumps that cheated consumers by overstating the amounts pumped.

In January 1993, four executives of a rental-car franchise in Florida were charged with defrauding at least 47,000 customers using a salami technique.^[4]

Historically, actual physical "penny shaving" may be considered a form of salami slicing. The edges of coins made of precious metals have been clipped or shaved by individuals in order to procure small quantities of said metals at a time with the intention that the coin would still retain its nominal value.

[edit] In fiction

[edit] Film and television

Salami slicing has played a key role in the plots of several films. The earliest mention of this practice was in the UK TV series The Sweeney, a 1976 episode called "Tomorrow Man", of a man rounding up percentage points and putting the difference in his own account (totaling two million dollars), using a computer. Other films include Superman III, Hackers, and Office Space (one of whose characters mentions Superman III as inspiration). In Office Space, Peter Gibbons, Michael Bolton, and Samir Nagheenanajar decide to divert the supposedly "rounded-off" portions of banking interest deposits after Michael and Samir learn that they will be laid off. However, they end up taking much more than the fractions of a cent because of a misplaced decimal point. In reality, currency banking transactions are usually conducted using integer-only functions; no real rounding occurs on the books (as all operands are stored and manipulated as groups of integers, with the decimal point calculated at the end of the transaction and stored as a separate piece of data), precluding this particular scenario.

Woody Allen joked that as a young man he stole a loaf of bread one slice at a time from a bakery at which he worked. After a crisis of conscience, he broke into the bakery to try to return the loaf but was caught red-handed.

In the TV series M*A*S*H, Radar attempts to ship an entire Jeep home from Korea one piece at a time. "Season 1 Ep 12". http://www.tv.com/M%2AA%2AS%2AH/Dear+Dad/episode/43211/summary.html. 

In the anime series, Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG, terrorist Hideo Kuze uses salami slicing in order to finance his actions, eventually stealing enough money to buy plutonium from a Russian smuggler.

[edit] Music

The term is used in the country song "The Ballad of Silicon Slim". A non-digital variant of the practice is described in the Johnny Cash song, "One Piece At A Time", in which the protagonist, an automobile factory worker, steals individual parts to build a complete car over a period of decades.

[edit] Literature

An example of salami slicing also appears in a volume of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series. The revolutionaries in Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress use the technique to fund their war for independence. Thomas Whiteside's 1978 book, Computer Capers, documents how a programmer at a mail-order company diverted money from rounded-down sales commissions into a phony account for three years before he was caught.

[edit] See also

• Salami tactics
• Smurfing

[edit] External links

• How computers enable salami slicing to occur
• A Network World article discussing salami fraud, with several examples

[edit] References