The 8008 was: Blinky lights WAS: The SR71 Blackbird was designed ENTIRELYwith slide rules 676

Actually people have been consulting with the "dark side" for a long time. Some get plea bargains to do this sort of "public service" work. At some point some of the businesses will become like Enron and start thinking, gee, why don't WE do this...

Computer based frauds of the "add a few cents to every transaction and wire the proceeds to my Caymans account" have been going on pretty much since automation entered the financial markets. Such schemes can sometimes net a modest profit, but the perps inevitably get too greedy and start taking it for granted, which is when they get caught.

The facts are these: People don't notice chronic losses until they either become a problem or some audit process catches them, usually initiated for some unrelated purpose. This is why some chronic diseases like cancer are so hard to diagnose in the early stages. People just adapt without thinking about it. Even acute incidents are often ignored because people don't want to "get involved" or "rock the boat." You'd be amazed at the kinds of things "an idiot would notice" which don't get noticed for years on end. Perhaps we should employ more idiots. :-)

These kinds of scams have been going on for long before computers appeared. So long as something is buried below the S-N ratio, it's a cost of doing business. Often when these people are caught they aren't prosecuted for fear of lowering stock valuation by a public scandal. Such distributed attacks have been a fact of life for centuries. With mail fraud they have even been perpetrated by outsiders, all without the use of computers.

As we've seen with companies like Enron and Columbia-HCA, they can involve millions or even billions of dollars in businesses where such cash flows are not uncommon.

History teaches that these things tend not to be noticed until either there's a crisis or some random person discovers the fraud, often in the course of investigating some unrelated matter.