Also featured in “Office Space”.
Has it ever been attempted in real life?
Salami slicing tactics, also known as salami slicing, salami tactics, the salami-slice strategy, or salami attacks, is the practice of using a series of many small actions to produce a much larger action or result that would be difficult or unlawful to perform all at once.
Politically, the term is used to describe a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition. With it, an aggressor can influence and eventually dominate a landscape, typically political, in piec...
Short answer: yes.
I learned that this was the formal term for such schemes when reviewing a contract that stipulated that the software program I was hired to write must not contain any salamis.
md2000
July 8, 2010, 10:06pm
3
I remember hearing the urban legend about this in the late 1960’s. Supposedly the programmer was caught when some little old lady asked the bank president where her fractions of a cent in interest were going.
A recent case involving credit card fees:FTC Obtains Court Order Halting International Scheme Responsible For More Than $10 Million In Unauthorized Charges On Consumers’ Credit and Debit Cards (ftc.gov , 28 June 2010)
At the request of the Federal Trade Commission, a federal court has halted an elaborate international scheme that used identity theft to place more than $10 million in bogus charges on consumers’ credit and debit cards, pending a trial. … Most consumers either didn’t notice the charges on their bills or didn’t seek chargebacks because of the small amounts – charges ranged from 20 cents to $10.
(italics mine, to emphasize the small amounts)