Employee theft has been on the increase since the Great Recession. With the economic downturn employees in desperate shape resorted to stealing in order to make extra bucks or to supplement their own personal needs. Along with corporate espionage employee theft is no laughing matter. It is no longer just some worker stealing pens and notepads. Some setup dummy accounts in the accounts payable where they siphon money to themselves. Some outright embezzle. And then some steal trade secrets and proprietary information and try to peddle them elsewhere.
As an employer, if you had a downsizing and now are rehiring old employers, don’t think the background checks you ran four year previous are relevant at this point in time. Employment screening should be considered an ongoing program, where you can run background checks on a more frequent basis.
According to an article in Bloomberg…”Alex Kibkalo, a Russian national, was arrested yesterday and ordered held without bail, according to federal court filings in Seattle. He admitted to Microsoft’s investigators that he provided the confidential information to the blogger, according to the criminal complaint filed by U.S. prosecutors.
Microsoft was alerted to the theft in 2012 by an individual, who asked that his identity wouldn’t be disclosed and who had been contacted by the blogger to help examine code for the Microsoft Activation Server Software Development Kit, a product developed for internal Microsoft use only, according to the complaint.
The company’s internal investigation traced the leaked information to Kibkalo, a seven-year employee who was working as a software architect in Lebanon, prosecutors said.”
