do you know about keypad fraud?

Within the company, management keeps watch. Even more so since the democratization of teleworking. The practice of one’s profession remotely became widespread during the Covid-19 health crisis in 2020-2021. Since then, many employees have worked from home. Some companies try to monitor their employees to make sure they are not doing anything other than working the hours specified in their contract. This is how the Wells Fargo bank announced that it had laid off around ten employees to “computer activity simulation”. This is what we more familiarly call keyboard fraudreports 20 Minutes, June 20, 2024.

To identify free riders, companies use “tattleware”, software that tracks employee activity. Directly installed on professional computers, they may or may not notice activity on the keyboard. An American company has even installed “tattleware” that takes screenshots every 10 minutes. So there are a whole bunch of possibilities for employers. Obviously, the response was not long in coming from the employee side. Thus, tools have also been designed to bypass software vigilance.

Tutorials for free riding on YouTube and TikTok

Among them, the best known is the one that allows the mouse cursor to move without human intervention being necessary. Therefore, the employee can be active for the hierarchy when this is not the case. Others tips can also be viewed on YouTube or TikTok. So you can scroll through fake PowerPoint presentations or use a character blocker in a word processing page so that it fills with the same letter.

Questioned on the subject, AJ Mizes, boss of a career advice company, believes that these new techniques for deceive the hierarchy are witnesses to a deeper evil that he describes as “work culture focused more on performance indicators than on constructive productivity and human relationships”. According to him, “This surveillance approach will only cause employees to find new ways to appear busy”.