

Are rounding errors a crime? - nickbruun
http://nickbruun.dk/2012/03/30/are-rounding-errors-a-crime/

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Piskvorrr
Sure, bugs and/or undefined behavior could happen for a variety of reasons.
And that's precisely where we leave the relatively objective realm of computer
programs and get into the murky waters of law. There's this thing called
"intent" - "did the programmer _mean_ to defraud the bank (and possibly enrich
himself), or was it an unfortunate coding error?" - and it's notoriously
tricky to prove or disprove, as you can't just attach a debugger to the
programmer and take a peek ;)

So: making errors, per se, is mostly not a crime (but you may want to get a
good lawyer anyway - criminal negligence and all that); writing _deliberately_
faulty code is quite another thing - even though the result may be
indistinguishable. To use a bad analogy, the end result "stabbing Joe in the
chest" might be reached by being extremely clumsy with your steak as well as
by having a knife-fight.

That said, following the money is usually a good rule-of-thumb: if (as the
story goes) the pennies rounded off third parties' transactions were deposited
into an unrelated account, that alone might have sufficed to establish _mens
rea_.

(This specific story is in circulation since the beginning of electronic
transactions in the banks - i.e., since 1960s - and it may be an urban legend
FWIW; but that's hardly the point. Also, IANAL.)

