I prefer to call it a 'perk of the job'.
There was one guy I heard about who got the tin-tack years ago. He was the Exchange Maintenance TO (Technical Officer), and back then there were regular 'Late call-outs' to free up Strowger gear that had locked up, got stuck, popped a fuse etc etc .....
If something did go wrong on a rack/suite, it would send a 'Prompt' alarm to the monitoring centre, they would ring the TO, he would visit, job done.
What this individual had apparently done (I wasn't there, but believe the guy who told me), was to set up a uni-selector so that he could ring it up from home, and be able to make the selector 'arm' traverse around until it finally became the 'make' in a 'Make or break' circuit. Thus initialising a false alarm condition. He would then get the phone call, and about an hour later he would ring the circuit back up and proceed to 'break' the circuit, thus cancelling the alarm condition.
We get paid a minimum 3 hours pay for a call out, whether you're in attendance for 10 mins or an hour, so he could clock up a lot of cash without leaving the warmth of his bed. As with all greedy people, they push it to far and end up ringing alarm bells in other places.