Isn’t it funny when a person tries to slander someone else but it ends up reflecting badly on them instead?

This man’s coworker tried to do that through an e-mail, but it backfired big time, and he didn’t even have to do much: she did most of the job herself.

Let’s read the whole story.

Be careful who you include in the CC list on emails – it might come back to bite you!

I used to work for a major financial services company and was in charge of their back office systems.

This is where trades are processed and all the money and stock movements actually take place after the trade is done.

One day I received an email from the head of finance going on about how one of the systems I took care of had “lost over a million dollars”.

It was a big deal. So she wanted to let everyone know.

She claimed that she had spent the whole morning looking and the money is just missing and so the system must have lost it.

In addition to sending the note to me, she had copied the COO, the CIO and a host of other senior staff.

This was a bit out of character – I usually got along fine with this person – so I took her at her word and started to investigate.

He found the answer. And let everyone know.

Fortunately, this was a system I knew intimately and so I was able to quickly track down what had happened.

I then hit REPLY ALL and sent the following.

“I have looked into the matter and discovered that the amount in question was moved using a manual journal transfer under the reference of KB01254.”

He was off the hook.

“As you are aware, the journal references are a combination of a unique number and the initials of the user that made the transfer and that KB is the initials assigned to you…”

I hit the send button with a satisfied smirk and heard nothing in response.

The next time I saw her, we both pretended like nothing had happened 🙂

She tried making him the scapegoat, but it backfired.

Let’s see how Reddit feels about this.

A reader shares some thoughts.

This commenter shares their opinion.

This person shares a similar story.

Hehehe.

Another reader chimes in.

Oof.

She ended up with double the embarrassment.

This could have been avoided if she had made some research before rushing to harm his reputation.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.