Fakers fired: The worst ever stories of employees pretending to work
So you know your employees probably waste a little time at work. That’s to be expected. But sometimes we hear stories so crazy, so extreme, that we honestly can’t believe someone would go to these lengths just to get out of doing work.
These spectacular stories of time-wasting will make you cringe. Here are a few of the worst employee scams we’ve come across:
Man outsources own job to China
A developer for Verizon in the U.S. actually outsourced his own job to China. Yes, you read that correctly. This guy took $50,000 from his several hundred thousand dollar salary and paid a company in China to do his work for him. He then proceeded to show up at work every morning and surf the internet, update Facebook, and watch cat videos. The most baffling part of this story is that when he was eventually caught (after years of doing this), employee reviews showed him as ‘a model employee’, and consistently noted him as one of the best developers in the company.
German civil servant did nothing for 14 years
Upon his retirement, one German public official sent a letter to 500-plus colleagues saying that he had not done any work for the last 14 years—and had collected 745,000 euros while he was at it. (As if people weren’t skeptical enough of the public sector.) The man, of course, blamed the system, saying that an inefficient hiring structure led to overlapping duties, and had even hired someone else to do his exact same job. Flawed system or not, let’s be honest here: he could have simply asked for more work.
Lawyer bills client for sexy time
We’ve all heard of cases of lawyers padding their billing hours. One Minnesota lawyer took it to another level when he started billing a client for the hours he was having sex with her. Having an affair with a client is bad enough…but making her pay for it? No wonder the truth finally came out. (Which it did when the affair ended.)
Toronto transit workers issue fake tickets to homeless
Looks like we’ve got our own home-grown fakers. Just a few days ago eight Toronto Transit Enforcement Officers were fired for issuing fake tickets to homeless people. Several hundred provincial tickets were issued to people with no fixed address—meaning the tickets never would have been received. An investigation found that the officers lied about where they were and what they were doing, and wrote the bogus tickets to cover their tracks, knowing that nobody would ever object to them. These guys were found to be running errands, visiting friends, and doing just about anything except working.
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