Client case No. 11. The cunning programmer, or the story of how a “freelancer” was caught

We continue publishing interesting cases that show how the Kickidler staff computer monitoring software has helped make our clients' business more effective.

One client of ours who wishes to remain anonymous shared an entertaining story how he was able to record fraudulent actions of a remote Swift-programmer.

But let's start with a small introduction… 

Our client's company specializes in development of mobile apps for different platforms. The team consists of 60 percent remote workers, which helps save money on office and doesn't limit the employer to a certain geographical location during the process of recruiting personnel. 

Accounting of working hours of remote workers and their payroll were organized with the help of the time tracker (not Kickidler), which took into account employee's time of activity at the working computers and also monitored what applications were being used for work.

Our client noticed that one of the developers was demonstrating bad results, and, as a result, the schedule of releases was being constantly pushed back and unpleasant feedback came from the customers. Despite that, the efficiency of that employee, according to the time tracker, wasn't below average in the team. 

The management had a serious talk with the employee, which, however, wasn't that fruitful, seeing how the employee claimed that he was doing his best and worked so much, and he said that it could be proven by the reports on efficiency.

Then our client on the pretext of expiring license of the old time tracker installed on the employee's work laptop our program Kickidler, which allowed to carry out visual check of the employee's activity because of the functions of online monitoring and video recording from the screen.

As a result of visual check with the help of the Kickidler “Online monitoring” function, it was revealed that the employee was doing third-party orders during the paid working hours, which meant that he was engaged in freelancing. 

This activity was recorded by the time tracker as productive time, seeing how the work was being done in “productive” apps, and it wasn't possible to see what exactly the employee was doing before Kickidler was installed.

The video that was recorded from the desktop of the employee with the help of Kickidler served as an argument for the management to fire him.

If you also have interesting stories regarding our program Kickidler, send them to us to marketing@kickidler.com. We will gladly publish them.