Armchair Safari (A Cybercrime Technothriller)

by Jonathan Paul Isaacs

  Ten minutes later Derek was at his desk, booting up his laptop and writing down the things he wanted to get done before lunch. He decided if he fixated on crunching out a bunch of stuff for work, he wouldn’t dwell on the previous couple of days. It was too emotionally exhausting, and he needed focus—a distraction from his eroding family situation—to keep functioning.

  So he started simply. Log into the network and fire up email. Check. Hit Oracle and kick off the reporting jobs. Running. He grabbed his travel mug and walked over to the executive break room. Waiting for the coffee while it brewed was a mistake, because Derek thought of four more things that he wanted to get done. He struggled to remember them as he went back to his office.

  He pulled up the first of several Oracle reports, starting with cash receipts and payouts. The number of players who logged in last week increased six percent week-over-week. An expanding player base. Good.

  Top line revenue for the month increased eight percent month over month. Since growth outpaced the player expansion, each player on average was spending more. Also good.

  The company’s cash balance was down over $2.1 million dollars from last week.

  Derek stared at the screen.

  Down two million dollars.

  He squinted at the odd figure in the report. Comprehension started to creep in.

  Two million dollars, gone.

  That didn’t seem right.

  Where did it go?

  What. The. Fuck.

  Derek leaned back in his chair, thinking through what he was seeing. Netertainment’s cash balance was down two million? Their cash had always been climbing up. Every week, like clockwork, even net of withdrawals and a fluctuating player base. There was no reason that Derek could think of why cash would decrease. But, that didn’t mean it wasn’t legitimate. Maybe this sort of thing just happened from time to time, and they had just never had visibility to it because the assets were held under the individual players’ names at BBC instead of Netertainment? Either way, a drop like that in cash was very material. It was Derek’s job to understand why it happened. He was going to need some help to figure it out and so that he could understand if he should be worried.

  Two hours later, he was very worried.

  All it took was a few words to Roger. Even at 7:30 a.m. their COO was busy dealing with keeping the company running. He dropped everything. Now, Roger, Lucy, and Manmeet were all crowded into Derek’s office and having an agitated exchange around how the money had disappeared.

  “All right, settle down,” Derek interrupted finally. “This discussion is all over the place. Let’s go through this step by step. Roger—I need to make sure I understand everything before I call Jim. Take me through know what you know, and what you think.”

  “You’re going to call Jim on this?” said Roger, his surprise evident.

  “Well, yeah. He’s the CEO.”

  Roger studied him. “Wouldn’t it be better to research it a bit more before pulling him in? Otherwise, you’re just going to alarm him when this turns out to be something blown out of proportion. Maybe even something that we’ve already resolved.”

  Derek folded his arms. “Then let’s talk.”

  Roger nodded and started pacing as he talked. “So, right off the bat, let’s start with something positive. I’ve already verified that there hasn’t been any actual cash disbursement out of Netertainment’s accounts. In other words, despite what your balance sheet reporting says, we still have the money according to the bank. We aren’t out of any money. That’s good news so far.”

  Derek was unconvinced. “So where is that money, then?”

  “Well... that’s the bad news,” Roger continued. “No one knows. It’s unaccounted for. Your metrics are a high-level summary of our financial position, and obviously they get produced toward the tail end of whatever process or event caused the mishap. Our investigation is trying to get ahead of that. Manmeet is running reports at the transactional level to track all cash movements in the past five days and see where there might be any drop-off. When we find a displacement—which we should, even if the triggers aren’t clear—we’ll know with more specificity where we have the issue. Then we can plug the hole, reassign the money, and put the right safeguards in place so that this kind of misallocation doesn’t happen again.”

  “Roger,” said Derek, “it sounds like you aren’t even convinced we have a problem here.”

  “Oh, no, let me be clear—we have a big fucking problem. Two million bucks? I’m worried, believe me. We really don’t even know if it’s our own money. It could be our players’ money. If we lose that, they you might as well douse yourself in gasoline and sing campfire songs. Our image will be torched.”

  “And you don’t think I should tell Jim?”

  “I mean, we might have to, I just wouldn’t do that first thing,” Roger countered. “Hey, this could be some latent bug that got triggered somehow in the game. If it’s an internal issue, we should solve it internally, you know?”

  Derek thought in silence for a full minute. All of Roger’s points were legitimate—Derek knew what Jim was like, and it would be foolish to alarm him if it proved unnecessary. BBC had said themselves that there was no money taken from the company. Yet. But somehow, Derek had a gut feeling that if something stunk, it was probably rotten. Netertainment had been in business for over four years and with a live game going for almost two. How was it that something as dramatic as this only surfaced now, and on such a grand scale? If there was a systemic bug of some kind internally in their environment, wouldn’t it have manifested itself earlier and with smaller dollar amounts as the game scaled up?

  In the end, Derek didn’t buy it.

  “What if it isn’t an internal issue?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if a hacker somehow got in and took the money?”

  Lucy’s head turned toward Derek with the look of a hungry cat that had been told there was no food. “What are you suggesting?”

  “Look, I’m not trying to be accusatory,” Derek offered. “But the fact of the matter is we have to look at any plausible causes for how such a shitload of money evaporated out of Netertainment’s balance sheet. What if we got hacked? Or spoofed? What if someone phished into a bunch of our customers’ accounts and stole their money?”

  “Impossible,” Lucy said matter-of-factly.

  “Why?” said Derek. “You told me yourself how it was done. Some bad guys convince a bunch of players to log onto a fake website... they think they’re confirming their account information... that information gets stolen, and the bad guys use it to login as the players and withdraw all of their money. If it could happen to a bank, it could happen to us, right?”

  “I said that to point out that we take extra steps to guard against it,” Lucy replied, clearly affronted. There was an edge in her voice. “We—my team—watch out for that more than any bank ever will.”

  Derek leaned back in his chair. “All I know is that there’s a lot of money missing, and there has to be a rational explanation for it.”

  “Well, it’s not from phishing.”

  “We haven’t checked for any of this stuff yet. You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that,” Lucy retorted.

  Derek tried to focus on the content of what he was being told, but it was hard to ignore the increasingly hostile delivery. Lucy was sitting very stiffly, glaring at him, her tattooed arms crossed in front of her with indignation as if he had suggested the most stupid idea in the universe. Derek thought back to their argument months ago when Lucy had been against moving their players’ assets to their own paper. It was as if she was now personally blaming him for their predicament.

  He looked to Roger for help in the argument.

  “We should be checking all angles,” Roger said carefully. “While I think Lucy’s right—that the likelihood is low someone outside the company is scraping out our dollars—we shouldn’t necessarily rule it out. Clearly we’re up
against something that we haven’t run across before. I certainly hope it’s some internal bug that processes and allocates buckets of cash. But, putting pride in our work aside, we need to not close our eyes to any reasonable possibility.”

  “Any other ideas?” Derek asked the room.

  The room was silent.

  “Okay. Two possibilities to start—a bug in the system, and hacking. Let’s go chase them down and reconvene back here in my office at three o’clock. I sure would like to know at least a little bit about what’s going on before I have to call Jim.”

  Their meeting was over. Roger strode out with purpose, while Lucy, still bristling, refused to make eye contact. Manmeet lingered for a moment and studied the photo on Derek’s desk of his unit from Iraq before finally following the other two out the door.

  Derek hoped there was a rational explanation for what he had seen.

  “So that’s the situation, Jim,” Derek explained on the speakerphone at his desk. After hours of inconclusive detective work, he had ended up feeling strongly that they needed to update his boss on the circumstances. Roger, Lucy, and Manmeet stood around him in support. “We’re still looking for where the funds are, and why they’re missing from our internal cash report. Bermuda Bank says that our balance hasn’t changed significantly, which is good. That means we haven’t executed any payout. But if something is queued up that we can’t see in our game metrics, we could be in big trouble. I wanted you to know what was going on.”

  Jim Palmisano, Chief Executive Officer of Netertainment and good friend of Derek’s, was silent on the other end of the phone. Derek folded his arms grimly across his chest. He had had a second debate with Roger thirty minutes before about whether or not it was the right thing to do to inform Jim. Roger was of the mind to wait. They were still researching what the heck was going on, and there was no precedent for how such a large sum of money could be displaced so quickly. For all they knew, if they gave it another twenty-four hours, they could discover a bug or glitch that falsely indicated their cash balance—and with no missing money there would be no reason to escalate the situation and cause a lot of distraction and unnecessary alarm. Ultimately, though, Derek won out. When money moved around in the game it always left an audit trail, and other metrics tracked and corroborated how and when it changed hands so that Netertainment could both properly pay out to its players as well as collect its own tax. All of those measures were missing. Something was just... wrong. Derek knew it in his gut. And it was his duty to keep his boss well informed of any material workings of the company at all times.

  The timing couldn’t be worse. Jim was doing a road show with Bill Tyson, their lead venture capitalist, investigating the appetite of potential investors should they consider taking their company public. If there was a storm brewing now that would come crashing down later, Derek had to make sure Jim was in the know.

  Finally, the silence broke on the speakerphone. “Derek. Would you ask the others in the room to leave for a moment, please.”

  Derek leaned back in his chair as he and Roger looked at each other. Roger nodded, and prodded the others out of the office. He wore a grim expression on his face as he pulled the door closed.

  “They’re gone, Jim,” said Derek.

  There was a moment’s pause, then: “How in the fuck could you let this happen, Derek?”

  Derek felt his throat get tight. Jim continued on, not waiting for an answer.

  “We are in the middle of grandstanding to analysts and investors about how great this goddamn company is and how it’s going to revolutionize online gaming,” his boss hissed. “We need to be air-fucking-tight. If there is a problem, these bastards will smell it and it will totally fuck up everything. I do not need anything that could derail this right now. You are supposed to be my financial steward, Derek. You are my CFO. You are responsible for anything and everything that has to do with our money. How could you let this happen?”

  “Jim, like I said, we don’t know what’s going on. We’re researching—”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck about research, Derek.”

  “I understand—”

  “Do you? Do you?” said Jim’s voice, crackling on the speaker. “No, I don’t think you do. Let me explain it to you. If our company’s business model is predicated on exchanging money between players, then it is paramount that there be no question about the integrity or those processes. If there are issues, or even the perception of issues, then our player base will go out the window like lemmings off a goddamn cliff. No players, no business. No business, no public offering. No offering, no fucking money in our pockets, Derek. We cannot be in this position.

  “You are my goddamned CFO, Derek. You are supposed to be watching the money. You are supposed to be thinking about how to protect the money. You are supposed to be prepared for anything. Hackers? Bullshit. You should have invested in better security. Accounting problem? Bullshit. You should be using different software, or hiring someone to make it work better. Unauthorized payouts? Bull-fucking-shit, Derek. It was your fucking idea to pull player accounts onto our own books. There could be a fucking tsunami that rolls over Mansfield Dam and takes out all of downtown Austin, and you better have a fucking flood insurance policy on the books. You are responsible for making it work, no matter what!”

  Jim wailed through the phone for what had to be another two or three minutes. Derek folded his arms across his chest and took it. It wasn’t easy, and he could feel the flush of embarrassment on his face. But the worst part, at least from Derek’s perspective, was that he knew Jim was right. There were no excuses in the business world. No mulligans or do-over’s. Derek had learned the lesson many times in the Marines, where being deployed and unprepared could easily result in death. So the Marines drilled and prepared and drilled some more. No excuses. Always be ready.

  Eventually Jim ran out of steam and wrapped up what was understandably a tirade of anxiety and emotion. The resulting silence in Derek’s office was deafening.

  “Well?” said Jim on the speakerphone. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  Derek sat in his chair and said nothing.

  “Are you still fucking there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Well?”

  Are you done?” asked Derek simply.

  There was a momentary silence.

  “Are you being fucking cheeky with me?” the phone shouted at him.

  Derek took a deep breath and stared at the phone, not speaking.

  Another few moments went by in silence. Then, finally, Jim’s voice came back through the speaker, infinitesimally calmer than a few minutes before. “Fine. What?”

  Leaning forward to the speakerphone, Derek cleared his throat. “You’re right, Jim. I am your CFO and it’s my job to head off problems like this, no matter what. I’m accountable for everything. But I’m not responsible for this block of money disappearing.

  “I’m also your best chance of figuring out what the root cause of the issue is and getting it fixed. So, let me be clear. Don’t—ever—talk—to—me—like—that—again.”

  There was more silence.

  Derek stared at the phone as if he were trying to burn a hole through it with X-Ray vision. He was angry himself. Earlier, with his coworkers in his office, he had been frustrated and anxious, but not angry. Two million dollars missing out of the balance sheet was a business problem to solve. It hadn’t been personal. But the tirade that Jim had just unleashed didn’t seem equitable. Derek was there to do well and make a difference. He wasn’t neglectful, he wasn’t uncaring; he did not lack for being earnest. Other employees had been involved in crafting this business and its inner workings long before he had ever arrived on the scene. True, the situation was happening on his watch, but it wasn’t as if Derek had single-handedly sabotaged anything.

  He knew that Jim was under a lot of pressure and that some of what he was hearing was just emotion. Derek could forgive that. In fact, normally he would have probably ignore
d it altogether. He was a big boy and it wasn’t like he hadn’t been in arguments before.

  But not this time. Part of Derek wasn’t sure why he was pushing back on Jim. It was insubordinate and dangerous. Jim could fire him on the spot. But for some reason he just didn’t feel like taking on a tirade. Maybe it had to do with the past weekend and facing the prospect of losing his marriage, of losing his son. He didn’t really care to lose his sense of dignity as well. Enough was enough. His dignity might be very well all that he had right now.

  The phone was quiet for a long time.

  “Derek,” Jim said finally, in a calmer voice through the tiny speaker. “I’m... sorry. I know it’s not your fault. It’s just upsetting news and at a very bad time. I—I apologize.”

  “It’s all right,” said Derek. He felt himself letting go of his anger, his mind able to focus again. Jim was his friend, and Derek was his in return. He was glad that they were both men—there was a certain dynamic to male arguments where you could do a bunch of yelling and screaming, a couple fuck you’s and then everything was settled and you got back to work. Derek refocused on the phone in front of him. “Jim, it’s important for you to understand that I’m just keeping you informed of the current situation, because you need to know. In the meantime, the team and I are doing anything and everything needed to stabilize the situation and recover the missing funds. Everything.”

  “I’m sure you are,” Jim acknowledged. There was a pause. “Look, Derek—this is important. I need you to keep this quiet. Find out the cause and fix it, but be discreet. Like I said, we can’t afford any... distractions... while Bill and I are on this road show.”

  “I understand. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Thanks. Please do. And good luck. Keep me informed daily of what’s going on. Twice daily.”

  They hung up and Derek opened the door to his office, inviting the others back in. Roger was the first one to sit down and looked as if he was going to stay awhile.

  “How many f-bombs did Jim drop?” said Roger softly.