US man busted for outsourcing his own job

A US man has been busted for outsourcing his own job to China.

The entrepreneurial employee paid a Chinese contractor a fifth of his six-figure salary to do his software development work, then spent his workdays browsing YouTube, eBay and Facebook.

Phone company Verizon was called after the man's employer - described as a "critical intrastructure company" - noticed frequent connections from Shenyang, China, to the man's workstation.

It suspected malware, or some kind of hacker attack.

But a Verizon risk assessment team discovered hundreds of invoices on the man's PC from a Shenyang contractor, the BBC reports.

According to Help Net Security, the company's HR department had found nothing wrong with the scammer's work (or at least that done on his behalf). 

In fact it "consistently gave him glowing performance reviews because he apparently wrote clean code and submitted it on time."

The offender is described as an "inoffensive and quiet family man." 

He was also well organised, perpetuating the scam across several employers at once to pull in hundreds of thousands in salary a year, while paying Chinese contractors around $US50,000.