Salami technique works like this: If you take a whole salami sausage from someone who owns the thing and won't like the idea, the person will notice and will try to get it back. However, if you ask one slice of it, s/he might give that to you. This way, you can possibly ask for many, many, many, many slices - most of the sausage - and the owner will not notice that you stole most of it.

In computer cracking scene, this mostly applies to banking and other things like that. One bored bank computer administrator once, I heard, got large amounts of money by transferring all thousandths of pennies (left over when rounding other transactions) to his own account. A bank manager stole a million in small amounts over a long time. All these are just legends - but the point is, the security people will notice all large transactions but ignore small ones.

Nickname for a kind of fraud or confidence game, more specifically, a kind of bill fraud.

An insider arranges for all of the fractional cents (e.g. from periodic interest payments) to be funnelled into a single account.

In this way, each transaction has only a thin slice removed (much like the slicing of a salami), but the accrued balance of the dump account (depending on the size of the institution in question) eventually grows big enough to clean out and clear out.

This scam figured prominently in the plotline of the film Superman III, as well as Office Space.

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