What were the biggest technology scandals of 2009?

We all remember what happened last year in December 2008, when Satyam CEO B Ramalinga Raju shocked the Indian IT world by admitting to have fudged the company's account. The revelation of what was the country's biggest corporate fraud left the company's employees and investors in a lurch

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This year, after months of enquiry, CBI recently filed a supplementary charge sheet against Raju and nine others, pegging the Satyam fraud at Rs 14,000 crore instead of the Rs 7800 crore that Raju had owned up to in January this year. The charge sheet had identified 1065 properties with a documented value of Rs 350 crore that were acquired by the Rajus with the spoils of the fraud.

The US government reportedly filed an expanded indictment against an IT services company, Visions System, for fraudulently using H-1B visas. According to a report, the US government alleged that the New Jersey-based IT services company paid H-1B workers based on Iowa's lower prevailing wage rates through the creation of shell firms in that state, and not the prevailing wage rates of the higher paying locations where they worked.
The report said that if federal prosecutors win their case against Visions System Group Inc, they will ask the court to approve $4.9 million in forfeited assets, an amount "representing the total amount of gross proceeds obtained as a result of offenses," the government said.
However, this amount is a reduction from the $7.4 million the US sought from Visions Systems in its initial indictment, filed earlier this year. The reduction was not explained in court documents.

There was another corporate scam where many fraud letters in the name of software company Wipro were going to prospective job seekers offering interview calls from the company. The company had faced fraudulent letters across e-mails that carried the company logo and its letterhead. The letters signed by one Narayan Murli ask aspirants to deposit a "refundable" security deposit of Rs 4,670 in a particular account number as payment towards the interview and promised attractive salaries in the range of Rs 15,000 to Rs 65,000 a month.

The e-mails were sent to job aspirants registered in different job portals informing that they had been shortlisted for interviews for various vacancies. These letters, were replete with spelling mistakes and erroneous language and originated from some public domain and not from the company's domain. The letters stated scheduled the interview at the company's Noida office though, Wipro has no office in Noida.

We all can remember, just two months ago, in October, Microsoft said that passwords belonging to some users of its Hotmail email service were exposed on an Internet site. Though the company did not say how many users were affected, but some reports suggested that passwords of more than 10,000 accounts were exposed.

Though they said that they were aware that some Windows Live Hotmail customers' credentials were acquired illegally by a phishing scheme and exposed on a website, it also said the exposure of the passwords was not a breach of any Microsoft servers.