Darlene & Charlene....A STORY OF TWO SISTERS

This is an outrageous & hysterical scam from a decade ago that had an unhappy ending

Twin sisters set up a little wholesale hardware operation and became PAS ( Pentagon Approved Supplier) since it was good for business. They would bid on minor hardware contracts

The PAS system is 99.9% automated. The Pentagon computer spits out the bids, bidders respond electronically, the computers select the winning bidder and issue the P.O. Suppliers invoice electronically and the Pentagon has an algorithm for approving the payment

What the system did not look at is the shipping costs. Those just got paid no questions asked

Darlene and Charlene discovered this accidentally when they omitted a decimal and a $50 shipping charge was invoiced as $5,000 (which they returned)

They did a few more test runs to verify this was not a one shot anomaly and then it was off to the races for six years

The house of cards came down when an invoice for $0.38 for two washers and a $988,000 shipping cost used a duplicate P.O. number so the computer spit it out for actual human review

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