As the chief teller at the Park Avenue branch of the now-defunct Union Dime Savings Bank, Roswell Steffen embezzled over $1.5 million over a three-year period in the early 1970s — roughly the equivalent of $10 million in 2022. Bank employees dipping into the till is a crime as old as the industry itself, but what made Steffen’s story so novel and newsworthy was his reported use of computers to brazenly steal. It's gone down in history as one of the first cybercrimes — if not the first.
The maddeningly vague documentation of how exactly Steffen carried out his slow simmer heist is a product of its time: A still-nascent computer age where technical language was still up for debate amongst industry professionals, and the general public was only just beginning to grasp simplified examples of what computational power could achieve.
Crime at the dawn of the computer age
World War II had functioned as something of a global coming-out party for the computer, and over the ensuing decades the general collective understanding of their role in the world began to take form. By 1973, the former notions of frighteningly powerful and possibly evil Hal 9000-esque black boxes had mellowed into a disinterested acceptance of computers as something more like room-sized knowledge repositories, fed by inscrutable tapes and cards, and spewing out rolls of paper, always humming away in the backstage of civilization, affecting everyone, for better or worse, in ways far beyond their comprehension. With more pressing matters always at hand, an individual’s lack of understanding about the operational mechanics of a computer rarely justified further digging.
So when the news said some bank employee was using these machines to steal money, the squishy and indis ..
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