Employees At The CIA Were Fired For Stealing Too Many Snacks

Every office has that one person who takes way too many snacks.

In the CIA's case, though, it appears there were a bunch of those types of people.

According to BuzzFeed News, which cited a recently released document, a number of CIA contractors were fired a few years ago for stealing thousands of dollars worth of snacks from vending machines over a period of several months.

No, seriously. The thefts took place between fall 2012 and March 2013 and resulted in a loss of over $3,300 worth of snacks.

Of course, with this being a theft on CIA premises, you might expect a clever operation to have been the months of gluttonous thievery.

A clever operation it was.

According to BuzzFeed News, the fired contractors had been unplugging a system, called Freedom Pay, which allowed employees to purchases snacks with cards.

Once unplugged, the thieving staffers were then able to order snacks with cards that didn't have funds.

In other words, it sounds like these guys found a way to have that lucky day at the vending machine -- when snacks just fall out of nowhere -- any time they wanted.

Genius.

I know what you're thinking: "This is too good to be true." The skepticism is understandable, but the source of this news is a declassified report from the Office of the Inspector General, dated October 2013.

The report notes,

Video footage recovered from the surveillance cameras captured numerous perpetrators engaged in the FreedomPay theft scheme, all of whom were readily identifiable as Agency contract personnel.

Now, there's a couple points worth mentioning here.

First, the CIA has got to have a better idea than a system that can be hacked by simply pulling a plug. I mean, come on.

Second, death to all office snack hoarders.

Last, between this hilarious story, and the nominee for FBI Director deleting information from his profile, the intelligence community is more like the rest of us than we think.

Who knew?