It’s a worst-case scenario for most people: there’s someone else in China who can do your job for about one-fifth of your salary, and your boss absolutely loves his work.

One U.S. software developer turned this nightmare on its head and actually benefited from outsourcing, a report says. He hired a Chinese developer to do his job, allowing him to take home impeccable performance reviews while actually spending the day watching cat videos and shopping on eBay.

According to Andrew Valentine, who works on the Verizon Risk Team investigating data breaches, the employee, who Valentine calls Bob, had pulled off the stunt for some time, relaxing and earning a good salary while someone in China did his job for him.

Valentine was hired to investigate when Bob’s employer saw that someone from Shenyang, China, was logging in to their computer network every workday. The breach was traced to Bob’s VPN network, but the company assumed he had to be innocent, the victim of some kind of breach. He was a quiet family man, “someone you wouldn’t look at twice in an elevator,” Valentine writes. But when Valentine’s staff looked more closely at Bob’s computer, they ultimately found the smoking gun.

Published date: 29th June 2016