Salami Slicing

Salami slicing, sometimes called a salami attack, is a financial fraud technique in which large sums are accumulated by repeatedly diverting very small amounts of money, often fractions of a cent left over from rounding in computerized transactions, into an account the offender controls. The technique depends on automated banking and payment systems processing enormous volumes of transactions, since the theft from any single transaction is too small to notice while the accumulated total can be substantial. Salami slicing has been prosecuted as a criminal offense in multiple documented cases, including a 1998 Los Angeles prosecution of four men for installing chips in gas pumps to shortchange customers, a 1996 Edmonton case that brought a four year prison sentence for skimming transit fare coins, and a Buffalo case in which a bank employee received a thirty month sentence for the theft.