Line #1 Main/PiecemealFundsTransfer


1	In the land of TV and movies, all electronic funds transfer systems work by transferring the money a little bit at a time.
2
3	We know this because while the transfer is in progress, you can clearly see a ViewerFriendlyInterface displaying the amount of money, which starts at zero and quickly increases. This is apparently because the money is being stuffed, one dollar bill at at time, through the connection.
4
5	In reality, a form of fraud known as ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing salami slicing]]'' or ''PennyShaving'' exists. This method uses rounding errors to steal substantial amounts of cash, often a cent or even a fraction of a cent at a time, working ''so slowly'' that no one notices. (The name stems from the fact that a salami with a very thin slice cut off one end looks almost exactly the same as it did before, so quite a lot of meat can be stolen undetected by doing this with dozens or hundreds of salamis.) If you're going to steal a whole load of cash in the time frame of the following examples, then you may as well just steal it all in one transaction rather than slicing it up into tens of thousands of microtransactions. (Unless it's being directed at multiple accounts, though obviously it isn't feasible to have thousands of those.)
6
7	Well, unless you want to further annoy your victim with the arrival of a bank account statement several ''thousand'' pages long at the end of the month. Or annoy the bank by making them print and ship it. Or both!
8
9	Another real-life approach is ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring structuring]]'' or ''[[Franchise/TheSmurfs smurfing]]'': if all transactions above a certain limit ($10,000 in the United States, [[http://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/LFPIORPI.pdf a purpose-dependent multiple of the national minimum wage in Mexico usually somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 pesos]]) are reviewed by regulators as a matter of course, then a large illegal transaction may be split into several still-sort-of-large pieces that are each below the limit. To muddy the waters further, each piece may be transferred by different accomplices at different locations.
10
11	This might become TruthInTelevision in the future if electronic stores of value are ever implemented which would consist of individual, cryptographically signed, monetary tokens in the form of computer files. They would work in a similar fashion to electronic postage or coupon codes and if you had a large number of small denomination tokens, they would take time to transfer one by one. However, since cryptocurrencies are more or less exactly that and they let you literally transfer 50 duplillion dollars in a single block transfer, this is probably not going to be the case.
12
13	SubTrope of ViewerFriendlyInterface, which is the general trope for when monitor interfaces are tweaked so the information they contain is easily seen by the viewers. It often overlaps with ExactProgressBar and follows the same reasoning as ExtremeGraphicalRepresentation (TV computers use large visual effects so the audience knows something's happening).
14	----
15	!!Examples:
16
17	[[AC:Anime & Manga]]
18	* ''Manga/AILoveYou'': Hitoshi has to correct a bank error himself using an AI program. On his screen, he sees the balance of his account go down several yen at a time. Somewhat justified in that the process of removing the virtual money is represented as his AI avatar entering a house and taking out armfuls of bills and dumping them...
19	* ''Anime/GhostInTheShellStandAloneComplex Second Gig'': Kuze funds his terrorist campaign by using a computer program that siphons fractional values off electronic transactions and deposits them into various shell accounts he owns. As he explains it, nobody notices the differences when there sums that go missing are less than a yen each.
20
21	[[AC:Comic Strips]]
22	* ''ComicStrip/{{Dilbert}}'': The PointyHairedBoss says that he can only approve purchase orders up to $10,000, so he can't get the engineers the $1 million equipment they need without them filling out a hundred ten-thousand-dollar purchase order requests.
23
24	[[AC:Films -- Live-Action]]
25	* ''Film/{{Entrapment}}'': The theft of the billions is shown on a progress bar. Granted, this ridiculously huge amount of money was probably stored on multiple accounts.
26	* ''Film/FairGame1995'': The villains need to hack an undersea phone line from a yacht. The transaction is represented as an ExactProgressBar and is later aborted because everything explodes it's finished.
27	* ''Literature/IBoy'': {{Justified\|Trope}} in the film adaptation, as the funds transfer needs to be done in small pieces in order to not attract attention.
28	* ''Film/OfficeSpace'': Due to a misplaced decimal point, the program in that film accumulated over $300,000 in its first few days --far more than expected, and a large enough amount to be quickly noticed.
29	* And of course, in ''Office Space'' they point out that the same technique was used in ''Film/SupermanIII''.
30	* ''Film/Oscar1991'': Anthony, who has taken over Snaps' bookkeeping, uses the protection profits to upgrade the bootlegging, and save 10 cents on each bottle of beer, only to lower the costs by 5 cents instead of 10, and accumulates a sizable nest egg of $50,000 a nickel at a time.
31
32	[[AC:Literature]]
33	* ''Literature/TheFearIndex'': {{Averted}}, as you would expect from a book focused around instantaneous trading.
34
35	[[AC:Live-Action TV]]
36	* ''Series/{{Bones}}'': When Pelant hacks Hodges's bank accounts to drain them, the program uses the "rapidly dwindling funds" variant. It might have been intentional in this case, so that Hodges could watch the money slipping away in real time while piggybacking off the program in order to stop a drone Pelant had sent to bomb a girls' school in the Middle East.
37	* ''Series/CriminalMinds'': It uses the "multiple transactions below reporting thresholds" in cases where someone pays off a hitman via a series of payments. Once they know that's what they're looking for, the strategy doesn't help the unsubs, since they just look for the smaller payments and see them adding up.
38
39	[[AC:Video Games]]
40	* ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerGenerals'': Each faction finds a way to continue warring after supplies in the immediate area run dry and there's no limit to how many can be built; The US airdrop supply packages, the Global Liberation Army gets a cut of profits from its black markets, and China employs hackers that utilize this trope to transfer small sums from different accounts ($5, 10, and 15 at a time as they gain veteran levels).
41	--> '''Hacker:''' Nobody will notice their money is missing.
42	* ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerGeneralsShockwave'': Hackers give you a trickle of money when using the Hack Internet ability.
43	* ''VideoGame/{{EXAPUNKS}}'': This is one way the player earns money.
44	* ''VideoGame/MassEffect1'': An AI on the Citadel is siphoning money from Flux. When you confront it, it both transfers its money and threatens to self-destruct, taking you with it. Shutting down the self-destruct allows you to take whatever money it couldn't shuffle away. Perhaps justified as the AI transferring many small payments from various gambling machines.
45	* ''VideoGame/{{Uplink}}'': For a game that intentionally invokes HollywoodHacking and gleefully uses MagicalComputer tropes, it surprisingly {{avert\|ed}}s this.
46
47	[[AC:Web Videos]]
48	* ''WebVideo/ALZIProduction's [[Recap/ALZIProductionBatgirl Batgirl]]'': Andrey Naumov makes a bank transfer after he sees his wife. It is visually represented by a loading bar.
49
50	[[AC:Western Animation]]
51	* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': In [[Recap/TheSimpsonsS10E23ThirtyMinutesOverTokyo "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo]], Snake Jailbird steals all the Simpsons' money by downloading it onto a floppy disk, employing this trope in an internet cafe called the Java Server.
52
53	[[AC:Real Life]]
54	* TruthInTelevision: One man was actually caught because his program worked too fast. He hadn't thought about how much money he would actually acquire, and when his account grew beyond reasonable levels, someone wondered where all the money was coming from.

Context Main / PiecemealFundsTransfer