I need advice that my lawyer can't give me

rockpiper

Some tech help. A friend of mine was sacked from work for fraud. He worked at a public counter cash ing cheques. He was told that some of the documnets he scanned were not encashed by the proper owner and that he had stolen them becuase the time lag between him scanning the suspicous voucher and the next voucher was not enough to pay out to a customer. The gaps are 8 and 13 secs. 13 is plenty but 8 eight is borderline. His PC sits on a LAN connected to a server which stores the voucher database. The system is old and buggy. Could computer hang or network traffic cause a lag of a second or more between him swiping the chq and the software recording it. I dont have any system specs. Please help a really good guy.

majiktripp

A very odd request...I doubt any input we would have for you would change the fact he got fired unless he went to the ombudsman with some kind of proof of unfair dismissal and even at that quoting replies and input from an internet forum isn't going be the technical indepth report that he would probably need to clear him of wrong doing...

Explosive_Cornflake

rockpiper wrote:

Some tech help. A friend of mine was sacked from work for fraud. He worked at a public counter cash ing cheques. He was told that some of the documnets he scanned were not encashed by the proper owner and that he had stolen them becuase the time lag between him scanning the suspicous voucher and the next voucher was not enough to pay out to a customer. The gaps are 8 and 13 secs. 13 is plenty but 8 eight is borderline. His PC sits on a LAN connected to a server which stores the voucher database. The system is old and buggy. Could computer hang or network traffic cause a lag of a second or more between him swiping the chq and the software recording it. I dont have any system specs. Please help a really good guy.

Did he actually steal anything? Did money actually go missing? It seems odd that someone would get fired over a time delay of 8-13 seconds alone. Surely he got a warning or two? The question can't be answered without knowing the network topolgy, but, in the case of lan, andthing over 1 second would be very unlikely. That's for transferring data anyway. Depends on all the software also?

seamus

It's certainly plausible, but even more likely is that he looked at the cheque, took the money out, scanned the cheque, gave the money out, then scanned the next cheque.

I'm very much guessing that money actually went missing, or they have CCTV evidence or something more concrete than an 8 second gap.

rockpiper

His Lawyer is handling the legal end. He needs some tech pointers, where to start really.The software is about 12 years old, must be pretty ropey, apparently it displays this message as it boots "the integrity of this software has not been tested" I dont think there is an issue with transfer rates I thought the transaction might be delayed if there was traffic from other users on the lan queued in front of the server or been processed by the server. The transactions were at a very busy time.

rockpiper

They have no CCTV. I suggested to him what Seamus suggested. He is too honest he told the investigation that he always scanned the cheques before he paid them to make sure they were valid.

seamus

Without knowing the architecture or the software, it's difficult to give a yay or nay either way. At best, it's plausible.

Logic would dictate that a piece of software wouldn't allow you to scan another cheque until the previous one had gone through and validated - if your mate scanned his cheques, then he would have scanned the first one, waited for it to validate, counted and handed out the money, and then handed out the second cheque.

However, logic isn't always applied in computer applications - particularly if this is an old piece of bespoke software.

So eh, yeah. Without having an experienced/qualified software tester sit at the machine and run a few hundred tests, then no-one could give a firm opinion either way.

Cuddlesworth

Its possible, but impossible to prove without a tech having full access to the machine. Your mate might be better off asking the question who else was a suspect and were they investigated?

RoyalMarine

write a letter to the ombudsman and see what they think... cant hurt to try... but yeah unless someone can get their hands on the software, and actually prove what happened was not what your m8 got saked for, then your pretty boned....

turbot

Depending on how old the system is, and each step in the process, it's possible that it could take way more than 13 seconds....

For example, I've seen databases running off servers, that were overloaded for the application, and the query time was up to 90 seconds.

More than this, if there is spyware in the PC, it's possible the front end is going so slow this could cause a long delay by itself.

rockpiper

Thanks for your contributions. Theres seems to be a consenus emerging that the timing evidence is inconclusive. Does anyone know of any site or learned publication on the use of computer timimg in court cases.

stevenmu

You're best bet may be to get in touch with (or get your friends lawyer to get in touch with) the people who supply and maintain the system. For a system like this there's probably one point of contact that supplies and maintains both the hardware and the software, and they're likely to be the only ones who can give a definitive answer. All anyone else can probably say is that it is plausible for there to be a delay in one transaction and then no delay in the next transaction, on some systems but not on others. Similarly any court precedent your likely to find (know idea how you would) is not likely to be specific to this exact issue and this exact system and is therefore worthless.




(p.s. you might want to change the thread title to reflect the fact that it's your friend who has a problem his lawyer can't help him with, not you )

ScumLord

It's very possible from what I've heard about corporate computer networks especially in Ireland where they won't even fork out to put their computers in the floppy drive age.

I had a friend who was fired because the tills didn't match up with the cash, he wasn't the first person to get fired for this (or the last, most the staff quit because they where slowly being fired one by one). He said the system was ****ed and they knew it but found it easier to blame the employee than the system, which I find incredibly stupid a company is money and you can't afford to let leeks go unatended.

We have fairly new software (4 years) in charge of all our finances and payment but it still has problems. these programes have to comply with new tax regulations and crap like that so that's a recent add on, tech guy installs it tests it once then walks away. Then it starts to act up and people do workarounds instead of fixing it.

There could be anything wrong from a time difference between server and client to enterys not being logged properly. If he's absolutly sure he didn't do anything wrong then that would be proved if they went over the system and talking to other employees, have others been fired for the same thing?

Khannie

Could you give me some clarity on your original post;

Here's my interpretation....

Your friend is sitting there doing his job...a cheque arrives in, he scans it, pays out, and 8 seconds later scans the next cheque? (according to the system).

The same happens on a separate occasion, except there is a 13 second delay.

Both cheques are fraudulently cashed by someone else.

He is sacked because 8 seconds (let's ignore the 13 second one for now, unless it is /directly/ after the 8 second one) is too short a time to accurately scan a cheque and pay out.

Is that correct?