How easy is to Freelance Big Companies?

[prabha_friend]

Thinking of becoming a One...

 

[plog]

That's one of those questions that if you have to ask it, the answer isn't one you will like.

1. Freelancing is all about personal connections. You need to know someone. And that someone must have a need, must believe you can meet it and have and the ability to get you hired.

2. Big companies hire employees or contract out work to firms. It's all about accountability and ass covering. Big Companies don't hire one off freelancers, they sign contracts with contracting firms and let those firms bring in contractors to do the work. That way if something goes wrong or doesn't work like its supposed to, the Big Company can blame the contracting firm, point at the contract and everyone at the Big Company can claim they did their due diligence.

So my advice is don't target Big Companies. Contact people you know and see if they can get you free lance work.

 

[KitaYama]

They have learned the lesson.

Between 2013 and 2015, Evaldas Rimasauskas of Lithuania stole $122 million from Facebook and Google by sending fake invoices they paid without verification.

Posing as Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese supplier, he registered a sham company in Latvia, then sent forged invoices—$99 million to Facebook, $23 million to Google—using fake emails, contracts, and letters.

The funds were wired to accounts in Latvia and Cyprus, then laundered through banks in Slovakia, Hungary, and Hong Kong. Rimasauskas pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2019, receiving a five-year sentence, and was ordered to forfeit $49.7 million and pay $26.5 million in restitution.

The scam revealed vulnerabilities in corporate payment systems, as neither company verified the invoices, spotlighting Business Email Compromise scams, which the FBI says have cost firms $3 billion since 2015.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/phishing-email-scam-stole-100-million-from-facebook-and-google.html

 

[Pat Hartman]

I remember an accounts receivable system I designed for the State of Tennessee back in 1973! Even in those pre-internet ages we were aware that crooks existed and incorporated procedures that required matching invoices to purchases. This is bookkeeping 101.

 

[Cotswold]

In my ticketing systems there would be a delete. It allowed operators to delete incorrect orders, or orders from comedians who rang in for a delivery to a non-existent address etc. Of course it also allowed actual orders to disappear so the operator could pick up some cash. The systems, however did not delete but just hide. Then the owner, or administrator could see cancelled orders and sort it out.

Some hire companies deleted all cash orders from the systems and pocked the charge and VAT. HMRC to my knowledge never ran a check on missing ticket numbers. Often amounting to many thousands of deleted tickets in a year.

 

[paul.brisenden]

Royal Dutch Shell (Shell petrol) use a huge amount of freelance IT staff, i only know this as my wife is a Programme manager for Shell Retail IT.

 

[prabha_friend]

Royal Dutch Shell (Shell petrol) use a huge amount of freelance IT staff, i only know this as my wife is a Programme manager for Shell Retail IT.

Thanks Paul.

 

[SachAccess]

I remember an accounts receivable system I designed for the State of Tennessee back in 1973! Even in those pre-internet ages we were aware that crooks existed and incorporated procedures that required matching invoices to purchases. This is bookkeeping 101.

Apologies for going off the topic. You developed something 52 years ago! That's an amazing journey. Since it was pre-internet ages, may I know which platform it was built on.

 

[paul.brisenden]

Apologies for going off the topic. You developed something 52 years ago! That's an amazing journey. Since it was pre-internet ages, may I know which platform it was built on.

i can only assume that it was carved into stone tablets

 

[SachAccess]

They have learned the lesson.

If FB and Google paid so much real money for fake invoice, is our data really safe with them?

 

[KitaYama]

If FB and Google paid so much real money for fake invoice, is our data really safe with them?

It's not only google and facebook, there's been a lot of cases like this

• Evaldas Rimasauskas – Facebook & Google (2013–2015)
• Amazon – $19 Million Scam (2020)
• Barbara Corcoran – $388,000 (2020)
• Pathé Netherlands – €19 Million (2021)
• Arup – £20 Million Deepfake Scam (2024)
• Flycatcher – $1 Million Toy Shipment (2024)
  Toy company Flycatcher lost three truckloads of Smart Sketchers worth over $1 million due to a scam where criminals posed as legitimate trucking companies, diverting shipments intended for Walmart distribution centers to unauthorized locations.
• Save The Children – $1 Million Fraud (2018)
• A-1 Janitorial – $2.6 Million Refund Scheme (2019)
• Polar Rig Specialties – $800,000 (2020)
• NEX Group – £668,000 Fraud (2017)

There are a lot more.
Corporate finance is different with how they handle private data. That said, as long as your data is saved on an exernal server, nothing is safe.

 

[SachAccess]

• Flycatcher – $1 Million Toy Shipment (2024)
  Toy company Flycatcher lost three truckloads of Smart Sketchers worth over $1 million due to a scam where criminals posed as legitimate trucking companies, diverting shipments intended for Walmart distribution centers to unauthorized locations.

Thanks for sharing. Pardon my ignorance but this is scary (for the companies) I never thought that such things would be possible with such big companies in digital age.

 

[Pat Hartman]

may I know which platform it was built on.

COBOL with VSAM tables. I'm pretty sure that at least two of my COBOL/IMS applications are still at least partially operational. One for Boeing and one for Pratt & Whitney.
The FE's may have been replaced by web interfaces though rather than IMS. Believe it or not, most large businesses still have major applications written in the dark ages in COBOL that they've never replaced because they still work. They are almost all maintained by Indians although every once in a while, I get contacted for a COBOL contract. I don't take them of course because they pay peanuts and almost always want you to work on site.

Thanks for sharing. Pardon my ignorance but this is scary (for the companies) I never thought that such things would be possible with such big companies in digital age.

That's what happens when your applications are designed by people who speak a different language from the application owners and have little business experience from which to draw inferences and potential dangers. For every application I ever designed that dealt with money, I used to have my team try to break it or steal from it once we got into development. It's amazing how creative programmers can get.

 

[SachAccess]

COBOL with VSAM tables. I'm pretty sure that at least two of my COBOL/IMS applications are still at least partially operational. One for Boeing and one for Pratt & Whitney.

Thanks for the reply. Couple of days ago I was doing a random search on GPT about older legacy platforms and COBOL was mentioned there.
And here I am interacting with an expert who has actually designed in COBOL and pretty much active and updated till date!

So, in short you were partially paying your team to hack your systems.
Have a nice day ahead.

 

[Pat Hartman]

So, in short you were partially paying your team to hack your systems.

Exactly but with the objective of closing the gaps so that no one else could take advantage of our weakness.

 

[Cotswold]

There has been a mention of going off topic, which is really common on Access World. Happens all the time.
This one went off, came back then went off again.

I once posted a question that quicky went off topic and wasn't resolved. So some time later I posted again with a similar question. The Doc Man then pointed out to me that I had already posted something similar. I explained why and then after a few posts the second post also went off topic, never to recover. I gave up after that and after a while as far as I can remember managed to resolved the issue .

 

[Pat Hartman]

after a few posts the second post also went off topic, never to recover.

Was it something you said:0 Usually posts go off topic when people think they have been answered and so are adding random comments.

 

[plog]

Was it something you said:0 Usually...

The worst, especially on technical sites like this, is when someone feels the pedantic need to point out inconsequential errors that neither correct nor clarify anything and add nothing to the conversation other than showing that the poster geniusly spotted something out of place.

 

[Pat Hartman]

The worst, especially on technical sites like this, is when someone feels the pedantic need to point out inconsequential errors that neither correct nor clarify anything and add nothing to the conversation other than showing that the poster geniusly spotted something out of place.

Isn't that somewhat pedantic? How do you know that the tangential information might not clarify things for the OP or someone else? More than once, a light has gone on for me as some random comment made something else make sense.

 

[plog]

Yes very pedantic. I was talking about the extraneous '0' in your post. It doesn't detract from your post or point (in fact, I bet very few even conciously saw it until this sentence explicitly pointed it out), but on this site people can't stop themselves from pointing it out to no real effect.

And now I've detracted this thread yet again. Double points for me.