Had a boss serve a steak he dropped on the floor. Maybe not illegal but a serious health code and ethical violation.

My workplace got busted for making bombs.

We had a little NAS in the office, tied into AD and everything. It was called “Hollywood”. Its contents was “donated” by the staff lol.

Edit: Sorry about the acronyms peeps, my bad.

Basically credit card theft.

Over twenty years ago, when I was pretty young and inexperienced, I answered a newspaper ad for IT/programming at a so-called “startup.” It sounded great.

My first day was in someone’s living room-turned office and I didn’t actually have any real idea what the business was. I was told it was a financial company, but it was taking off like gangbusters. Relatively quickly, within days actually, we moved into a very nice class-A office building. The owner was a remarkably charismatic man and being in his presence made you feel warm and understood and like you had a world of possibilities around you. I felt like a badass: I had a good-paying job, worked in a beautiful and prestigious office, and had a boss who made me feel great.

I found out, however, he was basically just running a scam. Between about 2-4am, he would have TV spots running, selling naive housewives, unemployment breadwinners, alcoholics, etc a “system” to earn huge sums of money very quickly. His system? You find people selling notes. You find people who want to buy notes. You introduce them and take a commission. A huuuuuuge commission.

Was that illegal? I don’t know. I kind of doubt the people in the ads were real, but my paychecks were clearing.

I learned that when his sales people (who worked late at night, when the infomercials ran) took orders, they would record everyone’s credit card info. Then, the owner directed us to automatically sign them up for things they didn’t ask for – recurring subscriptions to his membership-based “note marketplace” website. This was before the Internet was so mainstream, and many people buying this package didn’t even have a computer.

If people tried to place an order, and one credit card was declined, he’d just have them quietly try another card we had on file for them, without asking. If anyone complained, they’d obviously just refund the whole charge to avoid pissing off the credit card companies, but he was really just hoping no one would notice.

I quit pretty quickly and got a “real” real job.

Overheard the owner of my last company tell our corporate recruiter “we’re done hiring women, they just get knocked up and leave.” That, among other shit was why I left. My gf thought I was over exaggerating what they said and did but that was the incident that opened her eyes after I told her. They also did some shady shit with PPP loans that I actually reported a week or two ago. Who knows if anything will come of it but I tried and I’m willing to answer questions if the feds or whoever comes knocking.

I mentioned before that I worked for a guy who was high 24/7. It was a recording studio and he lived above it. There was always a bong in the kitchen surrounded by ground up weed. And law enforcement people would come in on occasion to record PSAs. He’s damn lucky they never suspected he was high as fuck.

EDIT: This was Indiana in the 90s when weed was even more illegal here than it is now.

my old boss would pocket sales tax customers paid. In quickbooks you could just have check mark to say customer is taxable or not per invoice. he’d invoice the customers with sales tax, and they’d pay it. and before the end of the month he’d go in and turn all the check marks for the invoices off. company is gone now.

God! Which one to choose?

The electrical company that let a drunk work because “he had 20+ years of experience”, which was rather dubious…

Or furniture retailers that had delivery drivers…read that again delivery drivers, drive drunk/stoned/coked out, and they were well aware they were.

Or people trying (Eh, let me be a little more specific…People certifying drivers) to drive in careers where people with mental issues should not be driving…(One guy I knew drove onto the shoulder chasing an oversize load with two bicyclers. He missed them, but god damn)…

Or my entire fucking family who don’t realize I’m getting bad at driving, and expect me to drive regardless that I might get somebody hurt…(I get a lot of flack for that).

When GDPR just launched it took us a while to implement it as we had a really complex key-value database. We got so few requests though that we had a junior dev do it with couple of python scripts every few days or so lol

Installed pirated versions of Windows on all employee and customer computers. We charged the customer for an os install and just used a cracker to activate it.

I’m sure this isn’t the biggest thing, but I used to work at a big chain grocery store and “accidentally forget” to scan certain items. Old woman with a food stamp in her hand vs. u/spez-level arrogant billionaire CEO? You pay me $10/hr you fuckers, if you want me to notice the toilet paper in the bottom of the cart you’d better up my pay or help that chick out. I was far from the only one.

I used to work IT at a company that leased electronic stuff to the general public. Oh boy were they shitty. Keep in mind, this is in a Western European country where employees and customers have actual rights.

There was a general policy of harassment and intimidation. Sexual harassment obviously. The female staff was constantly “ranked”, outfits were loudly commented. By management.

Sometimes you manager came next to you at 6:25PM. You’ve already been doing free overtime by then but utterly stupid management means sudden, unpredictable and hard deadlines. He would lit up a cigarette in your face and keep you until 10PM. Sometimes the deadline was so short and “important” people had to work until 5AM. For free (well, pizzas). And show up the next morning at 10 (instead of 9, woo).

Managers kept threatening you to cancel your holidays the day before leaving if you didn’t do this and that. Sometimes people had to connect from their vacations to do stuff because they were “critical” for something.

Money was a funny thing. We were constantly paid late. Sometimes more than 2 weeks late. Everyone who wasn’t an employee wasn’t paid at all. Not the rent, not the building staff (the toilets were FILTHY), not the contractors who remodeled the floor when we moved in, not the suppliers and especially not the IT contractors. I came in on day and found that I lost my entire team because their employers has never been paid.

One day, they lost a major investor because they lent money to purchase stuff to lease, not burning it in massive management salaries. As a collateral, the investor left with the customer database. So they were back to square one. So, as a get-new-customers-quick tactic, they created dozens of too-good-to-be-true promotions, like giving out electric scooters for new subscriptions and the like. With of course zero intention of honoring them out, since there was no money.

I could go on and on. Everyday there was new, shitty, borderline illegal stuff going on.

I once worked as a direct support specialist to support people with mental illness in the community. A hard job because a lot of clients would test how “loyal” you are to them (spoiler alert: I’m gonna support you 'til the end!)

I was just starting out and learning the ropes from these 2 people that had been helping out clients for a while. Some of the things they were saying they did with clients didn’t seem to add up (not anything too alarming, but situations where I thought the client would need support and the DSS decided not to assist). But I was still learning so I didn’t press the matter or report them.

But then after about a month I found I was the only DSS left. Turns out the 2 people I was learning from were taking part in all sorts of horrible abuse with the clients. Stuff like turning on the car’s AC and radio full blast because it’s “their car” (the client had paranoid schizophrenia, PTSD, and major trust issues before this happened).

So if you ever have family or friends who are working with DSS’s, go ahead and let them help, but be mindful of anything that sounds “off.” Talk to the organization about it. The right DSS will be glad you investigated.

Thankfully, my supervisor hired on 2 new DSS’s who were absolute legends and whom I was able to learn from.

Well, it depends: I’m not sure if the reason Lehman Brothers went bankrupt is to do with all the shaddy business going on there and after they went *puff* they were hardly going to be investigated, now were they?!

My old job stored chemical waste longer than what the law allowed in containers that werent labeled correctly. No one knew for sure what the waste was because the guy that was responsible for that before me would just mix different wastes together. The solvent fridge (just a normal fridge from the 90s against a wall in the prep area out in the open) had about 10 gallons of flammable liquids (old solvents and reagents from the 400 level labs and organic classes) and 3 one liter containers of 15 year old diethyl ether which is almost certainly chock full of organic peroxides. (These are explosive) There was another container of ~100g dinitrophenylhydrazine (DNPH) in the flammables cabinet no one paid any attention to for quite some time. It was a good thing that it never became dry as that would need to be handled by the bomb squad. (Previous guy found an old crusty jar of picric acid (a friction sensitive explosive) that resulted in the bomb squad coming to the lab. That shut down part of that campus until it was dealt with) And then theres a waste container that I found at one of the outlying campuses that according to the label, had nitric acid, ammonia and bleach which is… not great.