You know a news story is good when it conjures up not just one but two great memories (Superman III and Office Space).
A California man has been indicted for an inventive scheme that allegedly siphoned $50,000 from online brokerage houses E-trade and Schwab.com in six months — a few pennies at a time.
Michael Largent, of Plumas Lake, California, allegedly exploited a loophole in a common procedure both companies follow when a customer links his brokerage account to a bank account for the first time. To verify that the account number and routing information is correct, the brokerages automatically send small "micro-deposits" of between two cents to one dollar to the account, and ask the customer to verify that they’ve received it.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/man-allegedly-b.html
By the way, this is called salami slicing.
Isn’t this what banks do on many of their transactions?