History Main / PiecemealFundsTransfer

* ''Series/{{Bones}}'': When Pelant hacks Hodges's bank accounts to drain them, the program uses the "rapidly dwindling funds" variant. It might have been intentional in this case, so that Hodges could watch the money slipping away in real time while piggybacking off the program in order to stop a drone Pelant had sent to bomb a girls' school in the Middle East.
* ''Series/CriminalMinds'': It uses the "multiple transactions below reporting thresholds" in cases where someone pays off a hitman via a series of payments. Once they know that's what they're looking for, the strategy doesn't help the unsubs, since they just look for the smaller payments and see them adding up.

* ''Film/OfficeSpace'': Due to a misplaced decimal point, the program in that film accumulated over $300,000 in its first few days --far more than expected, and a large enough amount to be quickly noticed.
* And of course, in ''Office Space'' they point out that the same technique was used in ''Film/SupermanIII''.

* ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerGenerals'': Each faction finds a way to continue warring after supplies in the immediate area run dry and there's no limit to how many can be built; The US airdrop supply packages, the Global Liberation Army gets a cut of profits from its black markets, and China employs hackers that utilize this trope to transfer small sums from different accounts ($5, 10, and 15 at a time as they gain veteran levels).

* ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerGeneralsShockwave'': Hackers give you a trickle of money when using the Hack Internet ability.

* ''Fanfic/TheKarmaOfLies'': The final stage of Lila's con is transferring the funds she stole from Adrien's emergency account is a three-part transference. First, to an account that isn't tied to her, and then converting it to an untraceable form. Finally, she wires the money to her account in a Swiss bank. PlayedWith as the transferences are done fairly quickly--the former and last are instantaneous since they're regular bank transferences, while the latter is done by withdrawing the forty-nine million euros in one go in the form of eurobonds. But it's still done in bits.

Another real-life approach is ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring structuring]]'' or ''[[Franchise/TheSmurfs smurfing]]'': if all transactions above a certain limit ($10,000 in the United States, [[http://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/LFPIORPI.pdf a purpose-dependent multiple of the national minimum wage in Mexico usually somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 pesos]]) are reviewed by regulators as a matter of course, then a large illegal transaction may be split into several still-sort-of-large pieces that are each below the limit. To muddy the waters further, each piece may be transferred by different accomplices at different locations.

SubTrope of ViewerFriendlyInterface, which is the general trope for when monitor interfaces are tweaked so the information they contain is easily seen by the viewers. It often overlaps with ExactProgressBar.

* ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerGenerals'': Each faction finds a way to continue warring after supplies in the immediate area run dry; The US airdrop supply packages, the Global Liberation Army gets a cut of profits from its black markets, and China employs hackers that utilize this trope to transfer small sums from different accounts.

In reality, a form of fraud known as ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing salami slicing]]'' or ''PennyShaving'' exists. Often using rounding errors to steal substantial amounts of cash, often a cent at a time. Of course, the goal is to steal the cash ''so slowly'' that nobody notices (The name comes from the idea that since salami slices are so thin, a salami less one slice look pretty much the same as the original salami. As a result, taking one slice from a hundred different salamis yields the same amount of pilfered meat as stealing one salami, but the theft is a lot less obvious if there are a hundred salamis marginally smaller than they should be than if there are ninety-nine salamis where there should be a hundred). If you're going to steal a whole load of cash in the time frame of the following examples, then you may as well just steal it all in one transaction rather than slicing it up into tens of thousands of microtransactions. (Unless it's being directed at multiple accounts, though obviously it isn't feasible to have thousands of those.)

* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': Snake Jailbird steals all the Simpsons' money by downloading money onto a floppy disk, employing this trope in an internet cafe.

* ''Literature/IBoy'': {{Justified|Trope}} in the film adaptation, as the funds transfer needs to be done in small pieces in order to not attract attention.