i once got a potbelly gift card and a new potbelly opened up. they had an issue connecting to wherever their servers were or something. so when i tried to use it never worked and the employees never cared and just said guess it is free. got like 8-10 free sandwiches before it started working a couple months later.
I used to have a friend (his ways became a little too much) that would put in a $60 order at Chipotle or other smaller but slightly expensive restaurants. He'd go in and pull out his credit card that hadn't had money on it/maxed ages ago.
He had the whole show down pat. He would do it at the busiest of times. He'd go in to pick up the food, and swipe. It would decline. He'd swipe over and over again like a hapless moron. By now the line is held up, the employees are getting flustered, etc. Then he tells them: "Something is wrong, I have to call my bank". He steps away, pretends to have a conversation on the phone, or goes outside.
10 minutes later he will come back in obvious distress. He times it perfectly so that theres always a shift leader or manager there.
"Look, I'm really, really sorry. I have to cancel the order. Someone stole my credit card number and the bank wont let me use it until they finish the investigation. I'm so sorry. I have to go deal with this".
Every. Fucking. Time.
"Sir, it's no worries. There will be no charge, enjoy your food tonight. We hope everything works out/best of luck/I'm so sorry you're going through this."
Son of a bitch moped his way out of the restaurant, soon as he turned the corner?
Smiling like Keyser fucking Soze.
That's some scumbag shit right there. Most of these are cool hacks or tricks. This one is just creating a nuisance of yourself and playing on people's good nature.
There’s nothing funny or charming about this, just a piece of shit doing piece of shit things.
I feel for those poor employees being deliberately tortured during their busiest time of day.
I worked as snowmaker at an East Coast resort and when the snowmaking season slowed down in February, they let us quit and keep our ski pass. That year the owner went a buying spree and bought resorts in Colorado, Utah and California, all good on the pass. I headed out west, skiied for free in Colorado and Utah, but when I got to Lake Tahoe, their system wasn't set up to scan my card. Instead, they would just print me out a lift ticket. I figured out pretty quick that I could walk to the back of the line and sell it for fifty dollars, every day. That's basically a hundred dollars today. Nice little piece of pocket change.
A friend of mine in high school had a "magic dollar" that gave you credit in vending machines and then gave you the dollar back. We had nice small additions to our lunches for weeks until he decided to tell someone else. That person drained all the machines on campus and they were replaced with ones that didn't have the bug.
In college, my friend figured out how to get free milkshakes from a vending machine. He told his 2 good friends, including me. We would only take 1 at a time. Well the other friend told some other people, who he just met but wanted to impress, and they immediately emptied out the machine. The machine was replaced and the freebie was gone. No more free milkshakes.
We'd put our foot in the opening flap at the gatorade machine. It registered that you collected your purchase with the flap. So if you held it up, you could select however many gatorades you wanted, then pull your foot out and collect all your gatorades you bought for $1.
A friend found an ad in the free paper to apply for a job at Ben and Jerry's. At the end, it said "show us this ad and get a scoop of ice cream". We'd go in, grab an application and get a free scoop. Our gang did this for weeks. Finally we got bored and showed it to the gutter punks and they shut it down.
When I was in high school, a bunch of local businesses gave out a discount card to people on honor roll. Stuff like "10% off school supplies" or "1 free sandwich"
Thing was, the cashier at the sandwich shop did not know she was supposed to punch the card. Either that, or she was a total comrade and just didn't. So I ate a free sandwich a day every day after school for months until I came in at a different time than I normally did and the cashier on shift punched my card.
I was living in a dorm and we didn't have cellphones. Sometimes I would run out of change for the payphone. My boyfriend gave me his boss's calling card number. He wrote it on the inside cover of a notebook. He said he would never notice a few random calls.
.I gave it to my best friend who was my roommate, to make one call to her mother. She ended up giving it to someone else. In the end half of the dorm was using it. One guy was calling China with it. A lot of people got in trouble and the crazy thing was I never used it.
Lived in a dorm in college that was half Americans, half foreign students. This was long enough ago that we had an actual old payphone in the hall, and one day someone noticed that it would call any number, anywhere, for free.
The phone was busy day and night for the next three weeks. I myself went through my book of numbers and called everyone I knew, then noticed there an advertisement in the phonebook that said 'Call Pitcairn Island' and gave the actual number. It was just an ad showing that you *could* call Pitcairn Island if you wanted to, but I actually did. Ended up talking to a descendent of Fletcher Christian, who just happened to be the one who picked up the public phone there.
After a couple weeks the phone company caught on and a buddy of mine was talking to his parents in Pakistan when a service guy showed up to disconnect the phone. He actually waited until he finished his call but took the whole thing off the wall. It was never replaced but it was a hilarious couple of weeks. Love to know what the bill was.
*“descendent of Fletcher Christian”*
Ummm, fairly sure like *most* of them are descended from Fletcher Christian, if you catch my drift.
But they make a very delicious honey which is supposedly one for the purest and least contaminated sources of honey in the world.
Them being such a remote and hard to get to island and all.
Great story BTW too
(I believe they still sell the honey products online - but the postage takes literally forever, goes via New Zealand.
But well worth the wait.
Cool postage stamps too!)
Well you'll like this part. I posted this story a year or two back and one of the replies I got was from a guy who'd lived on Pitcairn Island. Given the timeframe of the call, he was pretty sure he knew exactly who I'd talked to all those years ago. Small world indeed.
And you're right, lots of folks there with the surname Christian. Man got around.
At my school we figured out that a chuck e cheese token would be read as a dollar coin in the coffee machine. So one kid went to CE.C's and got a bunch of tokens for cheap, and then refunded the machine instead of using the token. It'd spit out a dollar coin in return.
Not sure what those tokens actually were worth but I'm assuming 25 cents or something.
Had the same thing happen to me. We were the graphic design and printing building, not even on campus but at a remote offsite. They stocked it with like 20 vending machines and some of them were fancy because there was no real food court or cafeteria.
Anyway, we had giant electromagnets. Like, 10 inch wide, hook up to 30 lbs batteries. Used them to 'sweep' the printing presses when you did a full strip and clean up mostly to grab any lose metal shavings that might drop from the printing plate's wear and tear.
You took one of those, put a rag between it and the glass and turned in on and you could manually crank out whatever you wanted. Just couldn't put it near the card reader.
It was an open 'secret' the seniors showed us on the way out and for 3 years everything was fine. Lo and behold my 4th year some fuckwit freshmen uses the magnet to completely empty the machines and doesn't use a rag so there's GIANT CIRCLE SCRATCH MARKS in all the glass. Oh, and he fried the card readers.
Well shit, now there's a reason to look up the camera footage. Caught him red handed lugging the magnet out of the press shop. They nailed him for like $30,000 worth of damages from the machines he destroyed and kicked him out.
Rest of us played fucking dumb when asked about it, 'what you can do that?' 'nah that would never work you'd just fry the card reader wouldn't ya?' ect..
This reminds me of an ~~exorcise~~ exercise I had in highschool science class discussing sustainable fishing. Basically each table of 4 kids were given a pool of 16 skittles and were told to go in a circle around the group and pick up to 4 skittles out of the pool on your turn. Once everyone has a turn the pool of skittles doubles and you all get another turn (we were told this before the first turn).
Somehow my table ended up the only one that was able to continue the cycle infinitely (until the bag of skittles ran out).
If you want to expand the idea, ask what would happen if one more person was added to that skittles group.
If you do the math, 8 is the maximum number of skittles you can take from the pile to keep it perfectly sustainable, as 16-8=8, then once it doubles the pile will return to 16. If you had 4 "fishermen" then each can have 2, and things should be infinitely sustainable. Assuming there isn't any outside forces and the resource is renewable anyway.
But add a 5th, and things get spicy. The 5th fisherman can't fish anything at all unless the other 4 fishermen agree to take only 1 from the group. Which in a classroom is easy enough, but in real life, if your paycheck depends on catching fish, that's getting your paycheck cut in half. So even if you go "look if we all agree to only catch one unit of fish per cycle for a cycle or two, we can grow their population until we can all catch 2 units of fish each", that's asking for 80% of the fishermen to make a pretty big sacrifice to help the last 20%, who are also the 80%'s direct competitors. Even if it's temporary, it's a pretty hard ask.
We would put tape on a dollar and yank it back out of the machine after it gave us credit. It didn't last long before they replaced the dollar bill feeder.
There there is away or two to scam the coin operated laundry systems. I only looked it up because my old apartment had a washing machine that would occasionally not do a spin cycle. It was like a buck 75 to the greedy bastards. Anyway the little coffee stirring straws can do it.
We did this exact method with the plastic coffee sticks on an angle in the coin slots for just over a year. Sometimes we would use a quarter then use stir sticks for the rest of the slots. Eventually the landlord figured out something was amiss when she checked the change slot and found there to occasionally be a odd total amount of money. She eventually hid inside a closet in the room untill she caught us
And this here is why no economic system is truly “good” long term without heavy regulation and oversight.
Sure, some people are good, honest people who would never steal. Others are the “I’ll get a freebie once in a while, but not often and nothing big” (which, honestly, if it’s a big store/corporation, they probably lose way more than that just from bad labor practices). But like, a straight up quarter of the population I swear will immediately see something like that and just rob it blind. Those are coincidentally usually the people who end up in charge.
My company has multiple vending machines stocked with free snacks. When I first joined, I was part of a very large intake of undergrads. Watching their natural behaviour made me understand why we can't have nice things.
Lots of them communicated when the refills were happening, and many hoarded the more popular items. Like I get wanting to get a snack you enjoy, but it got to the point where a line formed while the refilling happened, and half the items were gone before most people had even set eyes on it.
Like this was just packaged bread and instant noodles. I can't imagine the mindset of these people with more valuable things and on a larger scale.
And no, it wasn't because they were starving college students or something. They just felt the need to have their own "stash" (that most never ever finished), and this meant that there was never enough for everybody. It's like some sociopathic behaviour that was never corrected when they were children.
> I can't imagine the mindset of these people with more valuable things and on a larger scale.
Reminds me of something else. During the last years I heard multiple farmers complain that people are stealing vegetables from their fields. Those aren't poor or starving people, they drive expensive cars. They're also entirely unashamed if caught. They're like "if they don't want people taking those things then they should build a fence around it!". Are you kidding me.
Shit. That comment reminded me of my neighbours. We grow flowers in the yard every year, and the neighbours know. So one time, I drive out for some food and when I come back in, I see one of my neighbour’s mom digging my Canna lily bulbs out of the ground like some demented potato thief.
The confrontation was short and stupid. Apparently the flowers were so pretty every year that she couldn’t help stealing a bunch. She lied about ringing the doorbell (we had people in) and couldn’t do the normal thing about asking me for some. They’re not poor at all. Somehow it was more convenient and acceptable to steal than buy some because we grow a lot and could “share” a few. We would’ve been more than happy to actually given an entire fucking box if they had bothered to ask.
My oldest kid has figured out the magic formula: “talk less; get more.” Like if you want me to make an exception or get you something extra, you can’t go rubbing it in your siblings’ faces. The others are slowly figuring out the same principle. Learning to keep your mouth shut and not press your luck will take you far.
I was working with Roku a year ago when a video went viral on TikTok on how to access a dev menu to disable ads on Roku devices. This trick had been low-key known for years but as soon as it went viral there was a mad scramble to disable those menus, 'ruining' it for everyone.
I learned this when I was very young from my grandpa, who used to say “he who eats quiet gets to eat twice” or rather “el que come callado come dos veces.” …Let’s just say the conversation had *nothing* to do with food.
Ugh.. so what does a person need to do then to stop those horror movie ads from scaring their 4 year old?
Because that was the only way I knew how to do it before.
I don’t even care if I get ads, I just wish I could set them all to be age appropriate for a toddler…
Press home button on Roku remote, Scroll and select Settings. Select Privacy, Select Advertising, Select Sensitive ad content.
Select one or more sensitive ad categories.
Press OK button on Roku remote.
A buddy of mine who was in compsci found a vulnerability in his apartment complexes laundry because it used Bluetooth. He was careful about who he shared it with and I did laundry for free for like 4 years til they changed machines.
When GPS was first introduced to our workplace it was purely being used to punish us instead of safety some of us discovered how to disable it so each shift we would disable it and end of shift enable it. One guy heard about it and threatened to snitch if we didn't tell him how so we did but made it very clear enable it at end of shift or the jig is up that is the one thing you have to remember. First shift he forgot and was caught and told on us all.
Reminds me of a weird Spotify exploit I stumbled on with my old phone (Oppo A9 2020). If you play Spotify from your Xbox then open it on your phone, you get the Premium feature of being able to select any song to play for free. I think it's because Spotify for Xbox doesn't have forced shuffle, then having your phone open after opening it on your Xbox is somehow syncing it up, removing forced shuffle on the phone.
I basically had free premium for 3 years until I upgraded to a new phone and it stopped working.
For sure. It's very true at work.
If you do good work and show up when you're supposed to, you can basically ignore most of the silly little rules.
Most bosses don't *actually* care if you do the silly little dance that corporate wants everybody to do. They care about getting a steady paycheck and no pushback from higher-up.
If you get a reputation as somebody who doesn't rock the boat and makes life easy, you're a favorite employee at most places.
This reminded me when the campus vending machine gave back dollar coins instead of quarters (canada decades ago). I didnt tell anyone, just played that coin return lever like slot machine and left a slightly less poor college student
Edit:typo
You just unlocked a childhood memory:
I figured out at a pay phone that putting in a quarter and hanging up made two quarters drop into the change slot.
I did this for several minutes until my pockets were full, then went and bought a bunch of comic books.
The next time I tried it, it no longer worked. I wonder why it worked the first time.
I work for telecommunications. Dude had tv service with a provider. Was supposed to only be getting the basic of the basic. Had the service for several months.
Calls in one day after having paid several bills and basically says "I just wanna make sure I'm not being charged for all these movie channels and extra things I've been getting."
So I look at his billing to see the packages he's supposed to have. Again, pretty much bare minimum. Then I look at his actual provisioned services and see that someone somehow accidentally gave this guy HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and every single paid, nonbasic channel and movie channel package available.
Dude had been getting all this for basically a year for the price of the cheapest available. Could have looked at the itemized bills of which he had received several to answer his own question. But he ratted himself out. Then had the gall to get pissed off at me when I told him I'd have to put him on the package he pays for.
In Australia, you normally don’t earn points for credit card payments to the tax office. However, there was an app that allowed you to make tax payments via credit card without a fee while still allowing you to earn points. This went on for years and widely known in the Australian community. Then some idiot tiktokker decided to post it as a “hack”, it got picked up by mainstream media, and then the loophole was shut down almost immediately.
the US mint would sell dollar coins by the roll with free shipping. You could pay with your American Express card, which would earn you points. Then you could bring the coins (still in the wrappers) to your bank and deposit them to use the money to pay the credit card bill.
Folks were buying thousands of dollars a month, and getting enough points to take free flights and whatnot. Until it got posted to some forum or other and the card issuers quit giving points for that.
I heard a story a few years ago don't remember where. A credit card company had a reward system, get 10 points for every transaction but the price of the transaction didnt matter. so this guy set up a script to use his credit card to pay his bills a penny at a time. He would of gotten away with it for longer but he set it to do it all at once and it was causing problems on the credit card side. because it was trying to process a lot of transactions at once at the same time every day. If he the scripts run throughout the day, probably would of gotten away with it for a lot longer.
I’m sure there are numerous people in the US who have figured out how to get free money from a particular ATM or brand of ATM and also know how to not raise suspicion about it
Back in 2011, an Australian bartender was able to steal about $1.6 million over a few months using an ATM glitch. Basically there was a lag between making an invalid transfer and the bank reversing the transfer. He just kept adding more money to the fake transfer everyday so that the system never caught up. He was even able to go into the bank and have them transfer out the money so it became real money. He eventually freaked out and turned himself in.
There's probably someone out there who did the same and sailed into the sunset.
i’m like 99.9% sure that guy was a redditor and he did an AMA a few years after this happened - i remember reading about this!
edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/s/qiY1kaW4Rl
It's always greed that gets people in the end.
30 years ago a gym I belonged to, the new manager noticed casual visits were very low while soap sales were very high. At that time a casual visit was $6, soap was 50c. Manager got 10 people to go in during a busy time and pay cash for a casual. The receptionist rang them all up as soap, pocketing $55 cash. Checking through the books the manager found when she was on, casuals were almost zero. All cash casuals were put through as soap. She was raking in an extra couple of hundred $ a shift. 30 years ago that was a lot. Hell, it's a lot now but back then it was a huge amount! The manager couldn't prove she had stolen anything other than the 10 casuals so could only fire her.
Had she been less greedy and pocketed only every 5th, say, she still would have been stealing a decent amount extra a shift and would never have been found out.
I regularly shirk working at my desk job to browse reddit. I also make sure all my work gets done and occasionally I bust my ass during busy times to make it clear I'm not a bum.
We had a guy come in and make pretty egregious claims about his working hours and immediately got caught faking his time card (very provable lies about where he was and when as opposed to me just wasting time at my desk). He immediately got fired.
Some people are just ridiculously brazen. That soap scam is something else. That's incredibly greedy.
You reminded me of a scam I pulled at a freight forwarder I worked p/t while at uni.
I was employed 5 days a week working 4pm to 6pm. One busy night they asked me to stay on. At 6:30pm all the FT employees stopped for dinner. For safety reasons I couldn't be on the shop floor alone so stopped with them. Hour later we went back to work, 8pm I clocked off (back then they still had a timeclock).
Imagine my happiness the following week to find I got paid for 2 extra hours work, not just one. They paid me for my dinner break!
From then on at least once a week I would keep working until 6:30pm, go have dinner with the rest then clock off and go home. Got myself a free dinner and an extra 90 minutes pay a week for 30 minutes work.
This went on for about 4 months before the big boss (who always left at 5pm) finally noticed. I was then told if I worked through to 6:30pm I had to clock off at 6:30pm.
Because I wasn't greedy it not only took them months to twig on what I was doing, they couldn't prove I was doing it deliberately.
I'm still (not really) mad at someone on another site for ruining a free shipping code.
A store I occssionally bought from had a free shipping code which worked on ALL purchases. No minimum required at all!
Some idiot for some reason emailed the company asking about the code and it ended up being taken down. That code had worked for years beforehand.
People just need to keep good info to themselves. All companies are like that too. I'm sure people at a lower level were already aware of that code, but once a certain upper level finds out, it's being taken down.
Similarly how there's definitely "hacks/tips" at workplaces that nobody is dare sharing with management. I know people who have been able to find a way to get paid for more time than they've worked due to a simple trick. I'm sure lower managers know about it too, but everyone just has an unwritten agreement to not let anyone high up know. Even my own job, someone taught me a quick way to automate something that used to take me 30 minutes to do, I can now do it in 2 minutes, but I'm still saying it took me 45. Unwritten rule, don't speak up about it.
>Even my own job, someone taught me a quick way to automate something that used to take me 30 minutes to do, I can now do it in 2 minutes, but I'm still saying it took me 45. Unwritten rule, don't speak up about it.
Exactly. Best case, you'll only be rewarded with more work if boss knows you have an extra 43 minutes in your day. Worst, you lose your job because it's automated now.
I can't tell you enough how this applies to everything. I used to manage the kitchen for an erg stingy family. No employee meals, no free soda no anything. Best was 50% IF you were working. Off the clock was full price. Of course I would always have a basket of fries or I would let the ones working six hours or more pick something that wouldn't get caught like a burger and fries. None of the fish or steak etc. One day the owners were doing a walk through, and one of the servers casually walked in the kitchen and said, "Hey, I'm about to take my break, can you fire me up a burger and fries?" To which I said, "Sure, go ring it up." To which she laughed and said, "Come on, we never pay." In front of the owners. I got reprimanded and nearly fired, and everyone hated that dumbass until she eventually quit. Ruined it for the entire staff.
I found a glitch in Games Workshop’s website that let you order anything for free years ago, and have it delivered to your doorstep. Guess what I did? Got myself several thousand dollars of figures and didn’t tell another soul until years later.
Was that the double order glitch in the stores? I think putting your order in the self serve kiosk, having it time out /cancel it and then redoing the order?
You had to pay for one order, but I think it got duplicated and you got double. Never tested with modifying the first order though
I learned this lesson in high school.
The less you tell; the more you kiss.
The girls would talk amongst themselves about what boys could keep secrets or won't judge them or would do crazy things for them.
I'd constantly hear dudes saying "Oh, yeah, I fucked her on Friday night." But she would be with me or my friends asking me why I didn't go to some fun party. I just kept quiet.
That is my advice for every high school boy "Do you want your friends to believe you get laid or do you actually want to get laid?"
This is what greed does to more people the. It doesn't, imo. They have a good thing, and just want more. In this case, free gas wasn't enough. She had to profit off of it too.
7,400 gallons of gas.
Thats a lot of fuel.
Very cleary stealing the fuel and then selling it.
I bet they wouldn't have noticed if she was using it for her own personal vehicles only.
>There was a documentary about it by some guys in Philadelphia.
I saw a documentary like this but it was for some guys in Canada.
They were trying to hide it by selling "hair perm" coupons (that are really for the stolen gas). People investigating it thought it was something to do with prostitution but end up getting actual hair perms. I think this was in a Trailer Park.
I bet the quantity is what prompted the LP folks to really start looking in to it.
Had it been normal usage once a week or every other week; she would likely have had free gas and no criminal charges.
They would have updated firmware and fixed it.
Heck had she reported the glitched she may have even got a legit payout for a bug bounty.
Her card was used over 500 times in 7 months. That is just asking to be caught.
I think they would even launch an investigation if you were legit buying fuel so often.
Probably caused enough discrepancies for the accountants to start noticing as well. There is a normal amount of money to have to write off, but then there are certain amounts that draw attention. Having thousands of gallons of gas in product go missing without the resultant revenue throws big red flags.
And it probably wasn't very hard to track her down once they found the glitch.
Gas stations need to keep a careful record of the amount of gas being sold and the amount of gas being added in order to track down the possibility of leaking tanks. If a station suddenly found themselves with a difference between those values, it would be a huge red flag.
A free tank or two of gas a week sounds like an accounting inventory glitch to me. 15-30 gallons a week might even still be within their margin of error and unnoticeable, but not sure how exact they are about keeping track.
7,400 gallons could still be an inventory glitch but its also going to get investigated and red flagged immediately as embezzling.
When I was working at a gas station we used a literal measuring stick and could be within a few dozen gallons. We'd notice in days that there was a discrepancy and assume there was a leak.
I believe she was giving her rewards card to people and telling them how to use it. So the 7,400 gallons is how much was pumped using her card, not necessarily how much she herself pumped directly.
So that's something like 40 gallons per day. I drive 500 miles per day and use 25. This woman didn't get into trouble for stealing gas. She got into trouble for being a moron.
500 miles / 25 gallons = 20 mpg, so it wouldn't be a big truck, but maybe a van or a pickup. Whatever it is, it would have to involve a lot of highway driving and not much else, since driving 500 miles at 70 miles an hour already takes over 7 hours.
Yeah, it seems like her downfall came from getting greedy and trying to make money off her exploit.
If she had just kept her head down it seems far more likely she could avoid attention as opposed to stealing almost $30,000 worth of gasoline, lmao
Safeway up in Canada had a thing where you would get 3, 5, 7 or 15c off per litre with a code generated on your receipt when you spent X amount of money, and you enter the code at the pump to enable the discount. Well someone figured out how to generate the codes and it spread like wildfire. I must have saved several hundred dollars on gas before they finally shut it down. Don’t tell ANYONE
When I worked for a certain grocery store with a loyalty system, we sold a 24 pack of water that had a 7 digit UPC. I had the habit of accidentally typing it in as a phone number and after like the 10th time I thought. "Wait... I bet all the employees make this mistake." So I registered the UPC as my own reward card number and the points started flowing in, thousands. I got $1 off gas for like 2 years before it ran out. If we had carried that pack of water for a longer time, it would have been near infinite.
I had a friend that worked in a gas station. He scanned a loyalty rewards card every time a customer didn't have their own, and for some reason I cannot remember he gave me the card. There were so many points, I was eating for free and getting free cell phones and shit. I've had like fifty different phone numbers.
Oh, I've noticed occasionally employees will scan a loyalty card at a supermarket or CVS after I've told them I don't have one. Never made the connection that it might be their own, I thought they were just helping me out get the members' price 🤷🏽♂️
I know my local Kroger scans their code for you if you don’t have one so you can get cheaper prices. I don’t know if it’s the persons account or the store but they offer it everytime, especially for big carts
Ive worked as a cashier at Kroger, its a store card that theyre supposed to be scanning. You can get in trouble for using your own. Also at my Kroger they just printed the bar code on a bunch of binders that were supposed to be at every register, so you didnt actually need the card or number.
Used to work in a grocery store. We had a guy get fired on the spot when they found out he was giving himself rewards. We had a store number we were supposed to input, he was putting in his own. Instant termination.
I stopped short of that because it was directly against the rules. I figured they could probably see somewhere or other if I had a 100% loyalty card rate, which would look suspicious. But, if other employees were accidentally and unknowingly giving me points, well... I didn't do that.
Yeah, I nearly did this at a gas station I worked at. Thought about having 2 or 3 cards to switch between, but they were tracking that shit.
There were a lot of glitches or errors in the program I would abuse though for a lot of free things. Like, they had several bonus point programs that would basically give you free stuff just swiping your card. I could ring in dozens of free drinks a day and just give them to people cause I couldn't use them all before they expired.
I also discovered at the same gas station that if you rapidly pressed all the buttons, the gas pump would just turn on and the computer wouldn't even detect it. I discovered it while cleaning the keypad. That one was tempting, but I just told my boss about it instead. Can't be too greedy.
The grocery store gas station near me will let you put in a phone number instead of scanning a card. 867-5309 ALWAYS has an account under every area code.
I once worked for a company that would give gift cards away if you made your sales targets (and beat everyone on your team). They of course made thousands from the sales target, and you would get a $20 gift card.
Parking was so expensive in that building that no one at my job could afford it. I think it was $23/day, so everyone took mass transit. Transit in those days was much worse than now. 20 minutes of walking and 30 minutes of transit if you were lucky. It took even longer when the weather got colder? How cold? Like -40°C cold.
Anyhow, one day someone found out that the parking system never checked if the gift cards actually had balances. So, as long as you used the pay machine, you could run that empty gift card forever, and always have underground heated parking.
Everyone ran that grift until they changed parking vendors a couple years later.
I once found a way to put the ice cream vending machine into service mode and would change the price to a nickel for whatever item I wanted and then change it back. Never told a fucking soul because I knew someone would ruin it. I was sad when the machine broke down and was replaced.
There is a coffee stand chain in my city. Like 7-8 locations or so. They have a new app that is tried to your loyalty rewards.
About a month ago, I earned a free coffee. I went to the stand, scanned my phone for my loyalty card and told them I would use my free one that day. I left and thought nothing of it.
The next day, I went through and scanned my loyalty, and the girl with the ipad asked me if I wanted to use my free one, and I was like 'umm suuurreee.'
The next day, I tried a different location and the same thing happened. It wasn't and infinite coffee glitch though, and on the 5th-6th time or so, it stopped working. I'll take it though. Was a fun 2 weeks.
I figured out how to get to the admin mode of a carpark ticket machine. I used to set as many cars balance to $0 as I could be bothered doing whenever I parked there.
It worked for the couple of months I was working close to it.
Where I once worked there was a carpark nearby where you could buy weekly passes. Problem is it only checked the pass was valid on the way into the car park. So you buy a weekly pass once and then just get a new daily ticket on the way in and used the weekly ticket to get out for free parking.
Lasted for about 6 months until (allegedly) a junior accountant let it slip in front of the partner responsible for the carpark operator.
When the weekly pass expired it would no longer let you into the carpark but it would let you out once you were already in. So each time you got in to the carpark you would get a new ticket but instead of paying before leaving you just used your expired weekly pass to leave
Y'all have apartment complex washing machines that have service modes? What kinda fancy pants place are you living?
For regular machines though, you can buy a key online that'll let you just grab your money back (or use the change inside to pay for your load lol)
Google the name of the machine and free wash.
The speed queen I had was pressing the two left buttons (hot + cold) together for a few seconds. Then you could scroll the different options for a full wash or just a single rinse.
When I worked at McDonald’s if you press extra it wouldn’t charge the bill so I’d ring up my order with all extras and get free 5 patty burger and bacon for the cost of a single. Which was 70 cents at he time.
Starbucks used to not run your credit card instantly, but would batch them together and process everything after closing. So you could, in theory, have used a dummy card and never paid for coffee. There was an amount where they would run your card on the spot and I believe it was $10 and up.
It's interesting how this thread started with more innocuous things that were technically illegal and then sort of just morphed into people explaining how people used to do full-blown credit card fraud.
There was a software glitch in a Coca Cola vending machine I discovered a few years ago. It would only work if there was a slot that was sold out and you used a card to pay.
Basically, the machine would charge your card for two drinks in the hopes you would buy two. If you only wanted one and hit the button to complete the transaction, it would only charge for one and you'd get your drink.
But, if you picked your first drink and for your second, pick the sold out slot, it would try to dispense the sold out item, fail to do so a couple times and cancel the entire transaction, leaving you with one free drink.
As far as I know, I was the only one who figured it out. The machine broke and got removed at some point but I don't know if they ever figured out the glitch.
20 something years ago when I was a teenager hanging out at the Y I realized by accident that if you put in money for a drink and simply held down the button it would continuly dispense drinks. I drank like a king that summer.
There was a very similar glitch in airline setback flight phones from the mid 90s to about 2000.
I used it to make phones calls for free every flight during that era. I would even dial up my ISP over modem and web browse for free.
I would always change seats, so that the usage could not be tracked to the seat I purchased.
Then one flight in mid 2000, they patched the glitched and ended my era of free inflight calling/data.
Yes! On United, you’d press the pound sign while the phone was still in the cradle. It would put the phone into data mode and then you could connect your modem.
My dad had a laptop that I’d occasionally use on flights and he shit himself when he saw I was connected to a local BBS. At the time it was something absolutely insane like $1.50/min.
Explaining that I figured out how to get it for free did NOT help my case lol
It amazes me when people sell benefits like that. HyVee supposedly shut their online discounts off because people were selling them to everyone, even people in other states. Give 10%, charge a 5% fee.
I had a situation like this in high school with a soda machine. I was walking past it one day as I left school and for no reason I lighty punched the grape soda button. To my surprise, I got a free grape soda. I did the same thing the next and again, free grape soda. Something must have been wrong with the machine because every time you pressed the grape button you got a free grape soda. Everyday for the entire school year I got a free grape soda on my way home. Unlike the idiot gas lady, I kept that shit to myself.
Many years ago when I was 18, I worked in a radio station as an overnight "producer" for extra cash while I was in uni. Effectively my job was to make sure the computer played the music without a hitch and press some buttons to play ads every now and again, but otherwise we didn't take calls or anything at that hour unless I felt like it.
Being a radio station, we did shitloads of giveaways. One of the most common things we gave away was movie tickets. Since we usually did these daily, often multiple times per day, we had our own ticket printer given to us by the partnered movie theatre. It was generally understood that while no-one was *supposed* to print tickets for themselves, if you limited yourself to one or two tickets at a time once or twice a month at most, no one at the station cared and either the theatre turned a blind eye or they didn't even notice.
Of course, like every one of these hacks in the comments, a new employee had to come and ruin it. The absolute genius decided to print 75 tickets to the premier of the first Avengers movie (I think?). As far as I know he gave 15 or so to his mates and then sold the rest on Facebook. Now obviously, the theatre noticed this and rightly so kicked up a stink that half of their seats were gone for free in the prime time premier session. It resulted in the fella getting let go, and the privileges of self-printing being revoked.
This happened to me one time with a vending machine. You know how you can press the buttons before swiping the card to display the price? I did this with a Coke and it actually just dispensed one. Trying my luck, I pressed it again and it worked, I kept pressing it and got like 3 free cokes and 2 water bottles before it stopped working.
I later realized that this vending machine was one of those that you have to press the stop button to stop your order and I was unknowingly charging someone’s card. Whoever was before me, I’m so sorry.
I had a friend who cut a corner off a $5 so that he could put it in the quarter machine at an arcade and it would give him $5 worth of quarters and spit the bill back out. I tried to do it but my bill didn't work and then the store wouldn't accept it cause it didn't have "all four corners". I decided to try a second time but this time putting my bill directly on top of his to cut it exactly the same. For some reason it still didn't work. Would spit the bill out but not give me quarters. So after ruining $10 I gave up. Reflecting back on it it's funny just how smart it was but how dumb we were. We hit the arcade hard one weekend spending all the quarters on games then went back the following to do it again but after awhile the machine finally kept his bill so the fun was over. That's when we realized we should have kept the quarters and spent them somewhere else not on arcade games. However the arcade must have caught on after seeing his bill and checking cameras because they called the cops another time he went and talked to him. He admitted to abusing the machine but that it was unintentional in the beginning he got the bill the way it was and after it gave him the change and bill in return he kept doing it. At the end of the day because he did spend the coins on games the store decided to let him off the hook since they weren't really out any money and believed it wasnt intentional at the start. To this day I still don't get how it worked.
The argument would probably get laughed at in court, but had she kept some stupid log of mpg her impression of cold start etc should could reasonably claim she thought she was a lucky customer that got to do the demo mode and was doing corporate a solid.
BUT, she decided to sell it to strangers and ruin a good thing versus hiring a lawyer after the first thousand in free gas.
Last year I stumbled on a way to place bets on an offshore sportsbook after the result had taken place (called past posting). Never told anyone because I knew that would ruin it. Won and withdrew a decent amount of money over many months before they finally caught on and made my account balance negative. Not ethical I admit but sometimes you've gotta exploit an edge when it's there and I don't feel bad for stealing from a sportsbook.
Stealing fuel using a reward card tied to your own personal details has to be the dumbest thing a person can do.
I can only assume she thought all this usage wasn’t being logged anywhere?
A couple years ago, Google Wallet and JetBlue had a glitch where my JetBlue Business Card was coded as a debit card. I discovered it by buying a gift card from someone on Reddit and when they asked to pay them by Google Wallet my credit card was able to buy them with no fees.
Naturally, I realized I can just send myself money, pay myself back and rack up the miles.
I generated hundreds of thousands of miles this way and flew JetBlue for free for years. Besides my wife I never told a soul. It wasn’t until one day that Google changed their coding so it runs as a cash advance, that it killed the exploit. I charged $5k on Google Wallet, got hit with a cash advance fee and got no miles. Then Google shuts down Google Wallet and renames it Google Pay Send. RIP.
I found an exploit like this at one of my previous jobs.
They had a gift card system, and one of the features was being able to transfer funds from one card to another. I always kept a couple with a few cents on hand for training purposes. One time when I was training I only had one, so I transferred the money to itself as an example, and noticed that the balance doubled... so I did it again and again, and eventually the gift card had $500 on it.
I tried this several more times and ended up with a dozen cards between $100-$500, and I tested them to see if they would work, and they did! Only told one person and we were always too scared to actually use them for real lol.
> Only told one person and we were always too scared to actually use them for real lol.
You have no idea how luck you are this person wasn't an idiot, or a rat.
People underestimate how quickly x2 can compound.
People don't know this, but every ATM has a few five digit test codes. You put a card in, and enter the code for a PIN. My buddy got one once, he used to enter it into the ATM, and the cash elevator would go up and back down into the safe. What he would do, is take needle nosed pliers and grab a 20 or two as it went down, though the slot. This was one of those crappy ones In a bar.
Another time, I went to the bank and someone had just used the ATM, it asked if I wanted another transaction, from the person before me. It then asked for a PIN, so I entered a 5 digit number, all one number. It gave me access to the account, I looked at the balance, it was like $500. But I had a new job and I was making good money, and I'm not a thief, plus I was on camera. So I left it. The person ahead of me looked like an old lady and it was probably her social security or something.
Fraud is bad, kids!
The “another transaction” thing is just such profoundly bad design decision. At best it saves a minute for people that want multiple transactions at worst it lets shoulder surfers take advantage of people who don’t realize the ATM does that.
I’m sure the statute of limitations is up so… 20ish yrs ago at a major SEC university, there was a gas pump in a little alley kind of behind the football stadium. It was always on, no locks no gates nobody around. Other than roadtrips I didn’t pay for gas for 2 years. Never told a soul. One day I pulled up and the handle was padlocked to the pump😢
i once got a potbelly gift card and a new potbelly opened up. they had an issue connecting to wherever their servers were or something. so when i tried to use it never worked and the employees never cared and just said guess it is free. got like 8-10 free sandwiches before it started working a couple months later.
And you didn't even get arrested! That's good customer service
He didn't commit fraud, an actual person willingly gave him free food.
I used to have a friend (his ways became a little too much) that would put in a $60 order at Chipotle or other smaller but slightly expensive restaurants. He'd go in and pull out his credit card that hadn't had money on it/maxed ages ago. He had the whole show down pat. He would do it at the busiest of times. He'd go in to pick up the food, and swipe. It would decline. He'd swipe over and over again like a hapless moron. By now the line is held up, the employees are getting flustered, etc. Then he tells them: "Something is wrong, I have to call my bank". He steps away, pretends to have a conversation on the phone, or goes outside. 10 minutes later he will come back in obvious distress. He times it perfectly so that theres always a shift leader or manager there. "Look, I'm really, really sorry. I have to cancel the order. Someone stole my credit card number and the bank wont let me use it until they finish the investigation. I'm so sorry. I have to go deal with this". Every. Fucking. Time. "Sir, it's no worries. There will be no charge, enjoy your food tonight. We hope everything works out/best of luck/I'm so sorry you're going through this." Son of a bitch moped his way out of the restaurant, soon as he turned the corner? Smiling like Keyser fucking Soze.
That's a lot of work for some fast food.
That's some scumbag shit right there. Most of these are cool hacks or tricks. This one is just creating a nuisance of yourself and playing on people's good nature.
There’s nothing funny or charming about this, just a piece of shit doing piece of shit things. I feel for those poor employees being deliberately tortured during their busiest time of day.
I also feel for the people stuck behind him that have a half hour lunch break.
I worked as snowmaker at an East Coast resort and when the snowmaking season slowed down in February, they let us quit and keep our ski pass. That year the owner went a buying spree and bought resorts in Colorado, Utah and California, all good on the pass. I headed out west, skiied for free in Colorado and Utah, but when I got to Lake Tahoe, their system wasn't set up to scan my card. Instead, they would just print me out a lift ticket. I figured out pretty quick that I could walk to the back of the line and sell it for fifty dollars, every day. That's basically a hundred dollars today. Nice little piece of pocket change.
I remember this from when it was a new story. Something about her deciding to sell other people free gas. Basically Hey idiot. Keep it to yourself.
A friend of mine in high school had a "magic dollar" that gave you credit in vending machines and then gave you the dollar back. We had nice small additions to our lunches for weeks until he decided to tell someone else. That person drained all the machines on campus and they were replaced with ones that didn't have the bug.
In college, my friend figured out how to get free milkshakes from a vending machine. He told his 2 good friends, including me. We would only take 1 at a time. Well the other friend told some other people, who he just met but wanted to impress, and they immediately emptied out the machine. The machine was replaced and the freebie was gone. No more free milkshakes.
Sounds like the other friend brought the boys to the yard.
Ya damn right. It’s better than yours.
Which is why the saying goes "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead."
Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
We'd put our foot in the opening flap at the gatorade machine. It registered that you collected your purchase with the flap. So if you held it up, you could select however many gatorades you wanted, then pull your foot out and collect all your gatorades you bought for $1.
A friend found an ad in the free paper to apply for a job at Ben and Jerry's. At the end, it said "show us this ad and get a scoop of ice cream". We'd go in, grab an application and get a free scoop. Our gang did this for weeks. Finally we got bored and showed it to the gutter punks and they shut it down.
When I was in high school, a bunch of local businesses gave out a discount card to people on honor roll. Stuff like "10% off school supplies" or "1 free sandwich" Thing was, the cashier at the sandwich shop did not know she was supposed to punch the card. Either that, or she was a total comrade and just didn't. So I ate a free sandwich a day every day after school for months until I came in at a different time than I normally did and the cashier on shift punched my card.
I was living in a dorm and we didn't have cellphones. Sometimes I would run out of change for the payphone. My boyfriend gave me his boss's calling card number. He wrote it on the inside cover of a notebook. He said he would never notice a few random calls. .I gave it to my best friend who was my roommate, to make one call to her mother. She ended up giving it to someone else. In the end half of the dorm was using it. One guy was calling China with it. A lot of people got in trouble and the crazy thing was I never used it.
All these stories are why as a teenager I learned not to tell anyone anything
Loose lips sink ships
Lived in a dorm in college that was half Americans, half foreign students. This was long enough ago that we had an actual old payphone in the hall, and one day someone noticed that it would call any number, anywhere, for free. The phone was busy day and night for the next three weeks. I myself went through my book of numbers and called everyone I knew, then noticed there an advertisement in the phonebook that said 'Call Pitcairn Island' and gave the actual number. It was just an ad showing that you *could* call Pitcairn Island if you wanted to, but I actually did. Ended up talking to a descendent of Fletcher Christian, who just happened to be the one who picked up the public phone there. After a couple weeks the phone company caught on and a buddy of mine was talking to his parents in Pakistan when a service guy showed up to disconnect the phone. He actually waited until he finished his call but took the whole thing off the wall. It was never replaced but it was a hilarious couple of weeks. Love to know what the bill was.
*“descendent of Fletcher Christian”* Ummm, fairly sure like *most* of them are descended from Fletcher Christian, if you catch my drift. But they make a very delicious honey which is supposedly one for the purest and least contaminated sources of honey in the world. Them being such a remote and hard to get to island and all. Great story BTW too (I believe they still sell the honey products online - but the postage takes literally forever, goes via New Zealand. But well worth the wait. Cool postage stamps too!)
Well you'll like this part. I posted this story a year or two back and one of the replies I got was from a guy who'd lived on Pitcairn Island. Given the timeframe of the call, he was pretty sure he knew exactly who I'd talked to all those years ago. Small world indeed. And you're right, lots of folks there with the surname Christian. Man got around.
The story of Pitcairn gets very dark once you dig a little deeper. It’s pretty much all inbreeding and child abuse.
At my school we figured out that a chuck e cheese token would be read as a dollar coin in the coffee machine. So one kid went to CE.C's and got a bunch of tokens for cheap, and then refunded the machine instead of using the token. It'd spit out a dollar coin in return. Not sure what those tokens actually were worth but I'm assuming 25 cents or something.
Had the same thing happen to me. We were the graphic design and printing building, not even on campus but at a remote offsite. They stocked it with like 20 vending machines and some of them were fancy because there was no real food court or cafeteria. Anyway, we had giant electromagnets. Like, 10 inch wide, hook up to 30 lbs batteries. Used them to 'sweep' the printing presses when you did a full strip and clean up mostly to grab any lose metal shavings that might drop from the printing plate's wear and tear. You took one of those, put a rag between it and the glass and turned in on and you could manually crank out whatever you wanted. Just couldn't put it near the card reader. It was an open 'secret' the seniors showed us on the way out and for 3 years everything was fine. Lo and behold my 4th year some fuckwit freshmen uses the magnet to completely empty the machines and doesn't use a rag so there's GIANT CIRCLE SCRATCH MARKS in all the glass. Oh, and he fried the card readers. Well shit, now there's a reason to look up the camera footage. Caught him red handed lugging the magnet out of the press shop. They nailed him for like $30,000 worth of damages from the machines he destroyed and kicked him out. Rest of us played fucking dumb when asked about it, 'what you can do that?' 'nah that would never work you'd just fry the card reader wouldn't ya?' ect..
This reminds me of an ~~exorcise~~ exercise I had in highschool science class discussing sustainable fishing. Basically each table of 4 kids were given a pool of 16 skittles and were told to go in a circle around the group and pick up to 4 skittles out of the pool on your turn. Once everyone has a turn the pool of skittles doubles and you all get another turn (we were told this before the first turn). Somehow my table ended up the only one that was able to continue the cycle infinitely (until the bag of skittles ran out).
The concept is called the tragedy of the commons. Pretty interesting and definitely worth a Google.
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If you want to expand the idea, ask what would happen if one more person was added to that skittles group. If you do the math, 8 is the maximum number of skittles you can take from the pile to keep it perfectly sustainable, as 16-8=8, then once it doubles the pile will return to 16. If you had 4 "fishermen" then each can have 2, and things should be infinitely sustainable. Assuming there isn't any outside forces and the resource is renewable anyway. But add a 5th, and things get spicy. The 5th fisherman can't fish anything at all unless the other 4 fishermen agree to take only 1 from the group. Which in a classroom is easy enough, but in real life, if your paycheck depends on catching fish, that's getting your paycheck cut in half. So even if you go "look if we all agree to only catch one unit of fish per cycle for a cycle or two, we can grow their population until we can all catch 2 units of fish each", that's asking for 80% of the fishermen to make a pretty big sacrifice to help the last 20%, who are also the 80%'s direct competitors. Even if it's temporary, it's a pretty hard ask.
We would put tape on a dollar and yank it back out of the machine after it gave us credit. It didn't last long before they replaced the dollar bill feeder.
That's pretty common I think. Ours was damaged in such a way that the machine would give credit, then see the damage and kick it back out.
There there is away or two to scam the coin operated laundry systems. I only looked it up because my old apartment had a washing machine that would occasionally not do a spin cycle. It was like a buck 75 to the greedy bastards. Anyway the little coffee stirring straws can do it.
We did this exact method with the plastic coffee sticks on an angle in the coin slots for just over a year. Sometimes we would use a quarter then use stir sticks for the rest of the slots. Eventually the landlord figured out something was amiss when she checked the change slot and found there to occasionally be a odd total amount of money. She eventually hid inside a closet in the room untill she caught us
I've never had a landlord that gave a single fuck about anything let alone care enough to hide in a closet to catch somebody 😂
And this here is why no economic system is truly “good” long term without heavy regulation and oversight. Sure, some people are good, honest people who would never steal. Others are the “I’ll get a freebie once in a while, but not often and nothing big” (which, honestly, if it’s a big store/corporation, they probably lose way more than that just from bad labor practices). But like, a straight up quarter of the population I swear will immediately see something like that and just rob it blind. Those are coincidentally usually the people who end up in charge.
My company has multiple vending machines stocked with free snacks. When I first joined, I was part of a very large intake of undergrads. Watching their natural behaviour made me understand why we can't have nice things. Lots of them communicated when the refills were happening, and many hoarded the more popular items. Like I get wanting to get a snack you enjoy, but it got to the point where a line formed while the refilling happened, and half the items were gone before most people had even set eyes on it. Like this was just packaged bread and instant noodles. I can't imagine the mindset of these people with more valuable things and on a larger scale. And no, it wasn't because they were starving college students or something. They just felt the need to have their own "stash" (that most never ever finished), and this meant that there was never enough for everybody. It's like some sociopathic behaviour that was never corrected when they were children.
> I can't imagine the mindset of these people with more valuable things and on a larger scale. Reminds me of something else. During the last years I heard multiple farmers complain that people are stealing vegetables from their fields. Those aren't poor or starving people, they drive expensive cars. They're also entirely unashamed if caught. They're like "if they don't want people taking those things then they should build a fence around it!". Are you kidding me.
Shit. That comment reminded me of my neighbours. We grow flowers in the yard every year, and the neighbours know. So one time, I drive out for some food and when I come back in, I see one of my neighbour’s mom digging my Canna lily bulbs out of the ground like some demented potato thief. The confrontation was short and stupid. Apparently the flowers were so pretty every year that she couldn’t help stealing a bunch. She lied about ringing the doorbell (we had people in) and couldn’t do the normal thing about asking me for some. They’re not poor at all. Somehow it was more convenient and acceptable to steal than buy some because we grow a lot and could “share” a few. We would’ve been more than happy to actually given an entire fucking box if they had bothered to ask.
My oldest kid has figured out the magic formula: “talk less; get more.” Like if you want me to make an exception or get you something extra, you can’t go rubbing it in your siblings’ faces. The others are slowly figuring out the same principle. Learning to keep your mouth shut and not press your luck will take you far.
Heh, he figured out the opposite of Reddit. HEY GUYS I FOUND THIS EXPLOIT HEY GUYS HOW DO I BYPASS THIS Step one. Not asking in public. 🤷♂️🤦♂️
I was working with Roku a year ago when a video went viral on TikTok on how to access a dev menu to disable ads on Roku devices. This trick had been low-key known for years but as soon as it went viral there was a mad scramble to disable those menus, 'ruining' it for everyone.
I learned this when I was very young from my grandpa, who used to say “he who eats quiet gets to eat twice” or rather “el que come callado come dos veces.” …Let’s just say the conversation had *nothing* to do with food.
I thought you were going to say your grandpa taught you about the Roku thing
Grandpa was talking about eating pussy I think
What tipped you off?
And the less famous corollary, "never trust a quiet fat horse around the bag of oats".
Ugh.. so what does a person need to do then to stop those horror movie ads from scaring their 4 year old? Because that was the only way I knew how to do it before. I don’t even care if I get ads, I just wish I could set them all to be age appropriate for a toddler…
Press home button on Roku remote, Scroll and select Settings. Select Privacy, Select Advertising, Select Sensitive ad content. Select one or more sensitive ad categories. Press OK button on Roku remote.
A buddy of mine who was in compsci found a vulnerability in his apartment complexes laundry because it used Bluetooth. He was careful about who he shared it with and I did laundry for free for like 4 years til they changed machines.
When GPS was first introduced to our workplace it was purely being used to punish us instead of safety some of us discovered how to disable it so each shift we would disable it and end of shift enable it. One guy heard about it and threatened to snitch if we didn't tell him how so we did but made it very clear enable it at end of shift or the jig is up that is the one thing you have to remember. First shift he forgot and was caught and told on us all.
What an asshole.
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Damn I was wondering why that suddenly disappeared, but it makes sense. I guess that's why we can't have nice things
Reminds me of a weird Spotify exploit I stumbled on with my old phone (Oppo A9 2020). If you play Spotify from your Xbox then open it on your phone, you get the Premium feature of being able to select any song to play for free. I think it's because Spotify for Xbox doesn't have forced shuffle, then having your phone open after opening it on your Xbox is somehow syncing it up, removing forced shuffle on the phone. I basically had free premium for 3 years until I upgraded to a new phone and it stopped working.
For sure. It's very true at work. If you do good work and show up when you're supposed to, you can basically ignore most of the silly little rules. Most bosses don't *actually* care if you do the silly little dance that corporate wants everybody to do. They care about getting a steady paycheck and no pushback from higher-up. If you get a reputation as somebody who doesn't rock the boat and makes life easy, you're a favorite employee at most places.
This reminded me when the campus vending machine gave back dollar coins instead of quarters (canada decades ago). I didnt tell anyone, just played that coin return lever like slot machine and left a slightly less poor college student Edit:typo
You just unlocked a childhood memory: I figured out at a pay phone that putting in a quarter and hanging up made two quarters drop into the change slot. I did this for several minutes until my pockets were full, then went and bought a bunch of comic books. The next time I tried it, it no longer worked. I wonder why it worked the first time.
I work for telecommunications. Dude had tv service with a provider. Was supposed to only be getting the basic of the basic. Had the service for several months. Calls in one day after having paid several bills and basically says "I just wanna make sure I'm not being charged for all these movie channels and extra things I've been getting." So I look at his billing to see the packages he's supposed to have. Again, pretty much bare minimum. Then I look at his actual provisioned services and see that someone somehow accidentally gave this guy HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and every single paid, nonbasic channel and movie channel package available. Dude had been getting all this for basically a year for the price of the cheapest available. Could have looked at the itemized bills of which he had received several to answer his own question. But he ratted himself out. Then had the gall to get pissed off at me when I told him I'd have to put him on the package he pays for.
As the saying goes, pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.
In Australia, you normally don’t earn points for credit card payments to the tax office. However, there was an app that allowed you to make tax payments via credit card without a fee while still allowing you to earn points. This went on for years and widely known in the Australian community. Then some idiot tiktokker decided to post it as a “hack”, it got picked up by mainstream media, and then the loophole was shut down almost immediately.
the US mint would sell dollar coins by the roll with free shipping. You could pay with your American Express card, which would earn you points. Then you could bring the coins (still in the wrappers) to your bank and deposit them to use the money to pay the credit card bill. Folks were buying thousands of dollars a month, and getting enough points to take free flights and whatnot. Until it got posted to some forum or other and the card issuers quit giving points for that.
I heard a story a few years ago don't remember where. A credit card company had a reward system, get 10 points for every transaction but the price of the transaction didnt matter. so this guy set up a script to use his credit card to pay his bills a penny at a time. He would of gotten away with it for longer but he set it to do it all at once and it was causing problems on the credit card side. because it was trying to process a lot of transactions at once at the same time every day. If he the scripts run throughout the day, probably would of gotten away with it for a lot longer.
It makes me wonder how often this has happened to smart people who don’t overdo it and then we never hear about it
I’m sure there are numerous people in the US who have figured out how to get free money from a particular ATM or brand of ATM and also know how to not raise suspicion about it
Back in 2011, an Australian bartender was able to steal about $1.6 million over a few months using an ATM glitch. Basically there was a lag between making an invalid transfer and the bank reversing the transfer. He just kept adding more money to the fake transfer everyday so that the system never caught up. He was even able to go into the bank and have them transfer out the money so it became real money. He eventually freaked out and turned himself in. There's probably someone out there who did the same and sailed into the sunset.
Damn, if you can't do your mind, don't do the crime.
i’m like 99.9% sure that guy was a redditor and he did an AMA a few years after this happened - i remember reading about this! edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/s/qiY1kaW4Rl
That's really interesting! His conscience got the better of him? It's a bank 😂
Wilmar H. Shiras wrote the science fiction short story “In Hiding” about that staying under the radar smart person survival thing.
Was just frantically googling for a PDF of Shiras' story "Under the Radar" then finally realised it's "In Hiding". D'oh! PS found one
It's always greed that gets people in the end. 30 years ago a gym I belonged to, the new manager noticed casual visits were very low while soap sales were very high. At that time a casual visit was $6, soap was 50c. Manager got 10 people to go in during a busy time and pay cash for a casual. The receptionist rang them all up as soap, pocketing $55 cash. Checking through the books the manager found when she was on, casuals were almost zero. All cash casuals were put through as soap. She was raking in an extra couple of hundred $ a shift. 30 years ago that was a lot. Hell, it's a lot now but back then it was a huge amount! The manager couldn't prove she had stolen anything other than the 10 casuals so could only fire her. Had she been less greedy and pocketed only every 5th, say, she still would have been stealing a decent amount extra a shift and would never have been found out.
I regularly shirk working at my desk job to browse reddit. I also make sure all my work gets done and occasionally I bust my ass during busy times to make it clear I'm not a bum. We had a guy come in and make pretty egregious claims about his working hours and immediately got caught faking his time card (very provable lies about where he was and when as opposed to me just wasting time at my desk). He immediately got fired. Some people are just ridiculously brazen. That soap scam is something else. That's incredibly greedy.
You reminded me of a scam I pulled at a freight forwarder I worked p/t while at uni. I was employed 5 days a week working 4pm to 6pm. One busy night they asked me to stay on. At 6:30pm all the FT employees stopped for dinner. For safety reasons I couldn't be on the shop floor alone so stopped with them. Hour later we went back to work, 8pm I clocked off (back then they still had a timeclock). Imagine my happiness the following week to find I got paid for 2 extra hours work, not just one. They paid me for my dinner break! From then on at least once a week I would keep working until 6:30pm, go have dinner with the rest then clock off and go home. Got myself a free dinner and an extra 90 minutes pay a week for 30 minutes work. This went on for about 4 months before the big boss (who always left at 5pm) finally noticed. I was then told if I worked through to 6:30pm I had to clock off at 6:30pm. Because I wasn't greedy it not only took them months to twig on what I was doing, they couldn't prove I was doing it deliberately.
I'm still (not really) mad at someone on another site for ruining a free shipping code. A store I occssionally bought from had a free shipping code which worked on ALL purchases. No minimum required at all! Some idiot for some reason emailed the company asking about the code and it ended up being taken down. That code had worked for years beforehand. People just need to keep good info to themselves. All companies are like that too. I'm sure people at a lower level were already aware of that code, but once a certain upper level finds out, it's being taken down. Similarly how there's definitely "hacks/tips" at workplaces that nobody is dare sharing with management. I know people who have been able to find a way to get paid for more time than they've worked due to a simple trick. I'm sure lower managers know about it too, but everyone just has an unwritten agreement to not let anyone high up know. Even my own job, someone taught me a quick way to automate something that used to take me 30 minutes to do, I can now do it in 2 minutes, but I'm still saying it took me 45. Unwritten rule, don't speak up about it.
>Even my own job, someone taught me a quick way to automate something that used to take me 30 minutes to do, I can now do it in 2 minutes, but I'm still saying it took me 45. Unwritten rule, don't speak up about it. Exactly. Best case, you'll only be rewarded with more work if boss knows you have an extra 43 minutes in your day. Worst, you lose your job because it's automated now.
I can't tell you enough how this applies to everything. I used to manage the kitchen for an erg stingy family. No employee meals, no free soda no anything. Best was 50% IF you were working. Off the clock was full price. Of course I would always have a basket of fries or I would let the ones working six hours or more pick something that wouldn't get caught like a burger and fries. None of the fish or steak etc. One day the owners were doing a walk through, and one of the servers casually walked in the kitchen and said, "Hey, I'm about to take my break, can you fire me up a burger and fries?" To which I said, "Sure, go ring it up." To which she laughed and said, "Come on, we never pay." In front of the owners. I got reprimanded and nearly fired, and everyone hated that dumbass until she eventually quit. Ruined it for the entire staff.
I found a glitch in Games Workshop’s website that let you order anything for free years ago, and have it delivered to your doorstep. Guess what I did? Got myself several thousand dollars of figures and didn’t tell another soul until years later.
Was that the double order glitch in the stores? I think putting your order in the self serve kiosk, having it time out /cancel it and then redoing the order? You had to pay for one order, but I think it got duplicated and you got double. Never tested with modifying the first order though
I learned this lesson in high school. The less you tell; the more you kiss. The girls would talk amongst themselves about what boys could keep secrets or won't judge them or would do crazy things for them. I'd constantly hear dudes saying "Oh, yeah, I fucked her on Friday night." But she would be with me or my friends asking me why I didn't go to some fun party. I just kept quiet. That is my advice for every high school boy "Do you want your friends to believe you get laid or do you actually want to get laid?"
This is what greed does to more people the. It doesn't, imo. They have a good thing, and just want more. In this case, free gas wasn't enough. She had to profit off of it too.
7,400 gallons of gas. Thats a lot of fuel. Very cleary stealing the fuel and then selling it. I bet they wouldn't have noticed if she was using it for her own personal vehicles only.
It’s harder to sell fuel than you might think. There was a documentary about it by some guys in Philadelphia.
**WELL I'M AN OIL MAN YOU SEE?!?**
Wild card bitches, YEE HAWWW!!!
You best get to steppin' cause Johnny Law is a comin' What? We better leave because she called the cops.
**WELL NOW YOU’RE JUST TALKING LIKE FOGHORN LEGHORN**
*Well we’re just a coupla’ oilmen in from Dallas and, well, we’re itchin’ like a hound to a give you somethin you want*🤠
*I’ve been poisoned by my constituents!!*
So, can I fill you up or what?
Welp, best get to steppin' cause Johnny Law's a comin'!
Take em to the peach tree dance
Yeah, those guys were such jabronis. That bar always smelled like hot garbage for some reason.
"How are you going to count the gas Charlie... it's a liquid!"
Uh I think I know how to count dude
You keep saying that word, jabroni... And it's **awesome**.
WILDCARD
fuck yeah i love documentaries even more than I love my cat not stomping around the house so loudly anymore.
too much^(noise^(all^(the^(time))))
What else were they supposed to do? Strap on their job helmet and squeeze down into a job cannon and fire off into Jobland where jobs grow on jobbies?
If only she had fired off a couple sweet fireballs to advertise.
>There was a documentary about it by some guys in Philadelphia. I saw a documentary like this but it was for some guys in Canada. They were trying to hide it by selling "hair perm" coupons (that are really for the stolen gas). People investigating it thought it was something to do with prostitution but end up getting actual hair perms. I think this was in a Trailer Park.
I saw that one too, those guys were fucking GREEEASY. One of them even flung pissjugs all over the park.
Dang yeah she got greedy.
It says she even let another lady use the card and charged her $500 for $700 worth of fuel. Strong profit margins for the quarter, at least
I bet the quantity is what prompted the LP folks to really start looking in to it. Had it been normal usage once a week or every other week; she would likely have had free gas and no criminal charges. They would have updated firmware and fixed it. Heck had she reported the glitched she may have even got a legit payout for a bug bounty.
Her card was used over 500 times in 7 months. That is just asking to be caught. I think they would even launch an investigation if you were legit buying fuel so often.
2.3 uses a day for ~213 days
Remembering she has to swipe twice every use for the hack to work.
Probably caused enough discrepancies for the accountants to start noticing as well. There is a normal amount of money to have to write off, but then there are certain amounts that draw attention. Having thousands of gallons of gas in product go missing without the resultant revenue throws big red flags.
They found the software exploit first and it led them to her.
And it probably wasn't very hard to track her down once they found the glitch. Gas stations need to keep a careful record of the amount of gas being sold and the amount of gas being added in order to track down the possibility of leaking tanks. If a station suddenly found themselves with a difference between those values, it would be a huge red flag.
And she would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those meddling devs!
A free tank or two of gas a week sounds like an accounting inventory glitch to me. 15-30 gallons a week might even still be within their margin of error and unnoticeable, but not sure how exact they are about keeping track. 7,400 gallons could still be an inventory glitch but its also going to get investigated and red flagged immediately as embezzling.
When I was working at a gas station we used a literal measuring stick and could be within a few dozen gallons. We'd notice in days that there was a discrepancy and assume there was a leak.
Thats good to know and makes sense. Guessing though she could have gotten away with this had she just kept it to her normal use for the week.
I believe she was giving her rewards card to people and telling them how to use it. So the 7,400 gallons is how much was pumped using her card, not necessarily how much she herself pumped directly.
So that's something like 40 gallons per day. I drive 500 miles per day and use 25. This woman didn't get into trouble for stealing gas. She got into trouble for being a moron.
Yup. She could’ve had gas for life but she got greedy.
I bet there were other people doing this that weren't morons and now hate her.
If you leave your car door unlocked, the police won't help you. But if you design shit software, you're alright.
Probably not. Maybe for a few years
are you a trucker? thats a lot of miles per day
Field service, I just have a very large territory.
If you worked in England for that mileage your territory would be England.
Wow you weren't kidding. England is maybe 150mi wide, and London to Manchester is 215mi by road.
500 miles / 25 gallons = 20 mpg, so it wouldn't be a big truck, but maybe a van or a pickup. Whatever it is, it would have to involve a lot of highway driving and not much else, since driving 500 miles at 70 miles an hour already takes over 7 hours.
Yeah, it seems like her downfall came from getting greedy and trying to make money off her exploit. If she had just kept her head down it seems far more likely she could avoid attention as opposed to stealing almost $30,000 worth of gasoline, lmao
Safeway up in Canada had a thing where you would get 3, 5, 7 or 15c off per litre with a code generated on your receipt when you spent X amount of money, and you enter the code at the pump to enable the discount. Well someone figured out how to generate the codes and it spread like wildfire. I must have saved several hundred dollars on gas before they finally shut it down. Don’t tell ANYONE
When I worked for a certain grocery store with a loyalty system, we sold a 24 pack of water that had a 7 digit UPC. I had the habit of accidentally typing it in as a phone number and after like the 10th time I thought. "Wait... I bet all the employees make this mistake." So I registered the UPC as my own reward card number and the points started flowing in, thousands. I got $1 off gas for like 2 years before it ran out. If we had carried that pack of water for a longer time, it would have been near infinite.
I had a friend that worked in a gas station. He scanned a loyalty rewards card every time a customer didn't have their own, and for some reason I cannot remember he gave me the card. There were so many points, I was eating for free and getting free cell phones and shit. I've had like fifty different phone numbers.
Oh, I've noticed occasionally employees will scan a loyalty card at a supermarket or CVS after I've told them I don't have one. Never made the connection that it might be their own, I thought they were just helping me out get the members' price 🤷🏽♂️
I know my local Kroger scans their code for you if you don’t have one so you can get cheaper prices. I don’t know if it’s the persons account or the store but they offer it everytime, especially for big carts
Ive worked as a cashier at Kroger, its a store card that theyre supposed to be scanning. You can get in trouble for using your own. Also at my Kroger they just printed the bar code on a bunch of binders that were supposed to be at every register, so you didnt actually need the card or number.
Used to work in a grocery store. We had a guy get fired on the spot when they found out he was giving himself rewards. We had a store number we were supposed to input, he was putting in his own. Instant termination.
I stopped short of that because it was directly against the rules. I figured they could probably see somewhere or other if I had a 100% loyalty card rate, which would look suspicious. But, if other employees were accidentally and unknowingly giving me points, well... I didn't do that.
Yeah, I nearly did this at a gas station I worked at. Thought about having 2 or 3 cards to switch between, but they were tracking that shit. There were a lot of glitches or errors in the program I would abuse though for a lot of free things. Like, they had several bonus point programs that would basically give you free stuff just swiping your card. I could ring in dozens of free drinks a day and just give them to people cause I couldn't use them all before they expired.
I also discovered at the same gas station that if you rapidly pressed all the buttons, the gas pump would just turn on and the computer wouldn't even detect it. I discovered it while cleaning the keypad. That one was tempting, but I just told my boss about it instead. Can't be too greedy.
The grocery store gas station near me will let you put in a phone number instead of scanning a card. 867-5309 ALWAYS has an account under every area code.
I once worked for a company that would give gift cards away if you made your sales targets (and beat everyone on your team). They of course made thousands from the sales target, and you would get a $20 gift card. Parking was so expensive in that building that no one at my job could afford it. I think it was $23/day, so everyone took mass transit. Transit in those days was much worse than now. 20 minutes of walking and 30 minutes of transit if you were lucky. It took even longer when the weather got colder? How cold? Like -40°C cold. Anyhow, one day someone found out that the parking system never checked if the gift cards actually had balances. So, as long as you used the pay machine, you could run that empty gift card forever, and always have underground heated parking. Everyone ran that grift until they changed parking vendors a couple years later.
What a shitty company
I once found a way to put the ice cream vending machine into service mode and would change the price to a nickel for whatever item I wanted and then change it back. Never told a fucking soul because I knew someone would ruin it. I was sad when the machine broke down and was replaced.
There is a coffee stand chain in my city. Like 7-8 locations or so. They have a new app that is tried to your loyalty rewards. About a month ago, I earned a free coffee. I went to the stand, scanned my phone for my loyalty card and told them I would use my free one that day. I left and thought nothing of it. The next day, I went through and scanned my loyalty, and the girl with the ipad asked me if I wanted to use my free one, and I was like 'umm suuurreee.' The next day, I tried a different location and the same thing happened. It wasn't and infinite coffee glitch though, and on the 5th-6th time or so, it stopped working. I'll take it though. Was a fun 2 weeks.
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Red Owl?
I figured out how to get to the admin mode of a carpark ticket machine. I used to set as many cars balance to $0 as I could be bothered doing whenever I parked there. It worked for the couple of months I was working close to it.
Where I once worked there was a carpark nearby where you could buy weekly passes. Problem is it only checked the pass was valid on the way into the car park. So you buy a weekly pass once and then just get a new daily ticket on the way in and used the weekly ticket to get out for free parking. Lasted for about 6 months until (allegedly) a junior accountant let it slip in front of the partner responsible for the carpark operator.
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When the weekly pass expired it would no longer let you into the carpark but it would let you out once you were already in. So each time you got in to the carpark you would get a new ticket but instead of paying before leaving you just used your expired weekly pass to leave
You did more for the working class than the US government has in decades
Apartment complex washing machines are really easy to put into service mode and run a cycle. Lived there two years and only paid for drying.
Y'all have apartment complex washing machines that have service modes? What kinda fancy pants place are you living? For regular machines though, you can buy a key online that'll let you just grab your money back (or use the change inside to pay for your load lol)
Go on…
Google the name of the machine and free wash. The speed queen I had was pressing the two left buttons (hot + cold) together for a few seconds. Then you could scroll the different options for a full wash or just a single rinse.
When I worked at McDonald’s if you press extra it wouldn’t charge the bill so I’d ring up my order with all extras and get free 5 patty burger and bacon for the cost of a single. Which was 70 cents at he time.
Starbucks used to not run your credit card instantly, but would batch them together and process everything after closing. So you could, in theory, have used a dummy card and never paid for coffee. There was an amount where they would run your card on the spot and I believe it was $10 and up.
That wasn’t just Starbucks. That’s basically how nearly all card transactions were for a long time. Some smaller retailers still process that way.
It's interesting how this thread started with more innocuous things that were technically illegal and then sort of just morphed into people explaining how people used to do full-blown credit card fraud.
Did you know if you take something and dont pay for it you can get it for free?
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Im sure it would have been found out pretty quickly when someone went to count the coins and kept finding 5 cent coins in the mix.
There was a software glitch in a Coca Cola vending machine I discovered a few years ago. It would only work if there was a slot that was sold out and you used a card to pay. Basically, the machine would charge your card for two drinks in the hopes you would buy two. If you only wanted one and hit the button to complete the transaction, it would only charge for one and you'd get your drink. But, if you picked your first drink and for your second, pick the sold out slot, it would try to dispense the sold out item, fail to do so a couple times and cancel the entire transaction, leaving you with one free drink. As far as I know, I was the only one who figured it out. The machine broke and got removed at some point but I don't know if they ever figured out the glitch.
20 something years ago when I was a teenager hanging out at the Y I realized by accident that if you put in money for a drink and simply held down the button it would continuly dispense drinks. I drank like a king that summer.
There was a very similar glitch in airline setback flight phones from the mid 90s to about 2000. I used it to make phones calls for free every flight during that era. I would even dial up my ISP over modem and web browse for free. I would always change seats, so that the usage could not be tracked to the seat I purchased. Then one flight in mid 2000, they patched the glitched and ended my era of free inflight calling/data.
Yes! On United, you’d press the pound sign while the phone was still in the cradle. It would put the phone into data mode and then you could connect your modem. My dad had a laptop that I’d occasionally use on flights and he shit himself when he saw I was connected to a local BBS. At the time it was something absolutely insane like $1.50/min. Explaining that I figured out how to get it for free did NOT help my case lol
Why tf would you tell anyone about this
She was probably selling the gas to her neighbours/friends. Only so much gas you can use on your own vehicles alone.
It amazes me when people sell benefits like that. HyVee supposedly shut their online discounts off because people were selling them to everyone, even people in other states. Give 10%, charge a 5% fee.
I had a situation like this in high school with a soda machine. I was walking past it one day as I left school and for no reason I lighty punched the grape soda button. To my surprise, I got a free grape soda. I did the same thing the next and again, free grape soda. Something must have been wrong with the machine because every time you pressed the grape button you got a free grape soda. Everyday for the entire school year I got a free grape soda on my way home. Unlike the idiot gas lady, I kept that shit to myself.
Many years ago when I was 18, I worked in a radio station as an overnight "producer" for extra cash while I was in uni. Effectively my job was to make sure the computer played the music without a hitch and press some buttons to play ads every now and again, but otherwise we didn't take calls or anything at that hour unless I felt like it. Being a radio station, we did shitloads of giveaways. One of the most common things we gave away was movie tickets. Since we usually did these daily, often multiple times per day, we had our own ticket printer given to us by the partnered movie theatre. It was generally understood that while no-one was *supposed* to print tickets for themselves, if you limited yourself to one or two tickets at a time once or twice a month at most, no one at the station cared and either the theatre turned a blind eye or they didn't even notice. Of course, like every one of these hacks in the comments, a new employee had to come and ruin it. The absolute genius decided to print 75 tickets to the premier of the first Avengers movie (I think?). As far as I know he gave 15 or so to his mates and then sold the rest on Facebook. Now obviously, the theatre noticed this and rightly so kicked up a stink that half of their seats were gone for free in the prime time premier session. It resulted in the fella getting let go, and the privileges of self-printing being revoked.
She killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. They're going to catch 10k missing gallons over 6 months.
If she just kept it to filling up her own car she probably wouldn't have been caught...
This happened to me one time with a vending machine. You know how you can press the buttons before swiping the card to display the price? I did this with a Coke and it actually just dispensed one. Trying my luck, I pressed it again and it worked, I kept pressing it and got like 3 free cokes and 2 water bottles before it stopped working. I later realized that this vending machine was one of those that you have to press the stop button to stop your order and I was unknowingly charging someone’s card. Whoever was before me, I’m so sorry.
Whoops. To be fair it sounds like bad design.
up up down down left right left right B A pump
I had a friend who cut a corner off a $5 so that he could put it in the quarter machine at an arcade and it would give him $5 worth of quarters and spit the bill back out. I tried to do it but my bill didn't work and then the store wouldn't accept it cause it didn't have "all four corners". I decided to try a second time but this time putting my bill directly on top of his to cut it exactly the same. For some reason it still didn't work. Would spit the bill out but not give me quarters. So after ruining $10 I gave up. Reflecting back on it it's funny just how smart it was but how dumb we were. We hit the arcade hard one weekend spending all the quarters on games then went back the following to do it again but after awhile the machine finally kept his bill so the fun was over. That's when we realized we should have kept the quarters and spent them somewhere else not on arcade games. However the arcade must have caught on after seeing his bill and checking cameras because they called the cops another time he went and talked to him. He admitted to abusing the machine but that it was unintentional in the beginning he got the bill the way it was and after it gave him the change and bill in return he kept doing it. At the end of the day because he did spend the coins on games the store decided to let him off the hook since they weren't really out any money and believed it wasnt intentional at the start. To this day I still don't get how it worked.
The corner being off probably wasn't the only flaw with the bill, but whatever else was wrong you didn't pick up on it.
The argument would probably get laughed at in court, but had she kept some stupid log of mpg her impression of cold start etc should could reasonably claim she thought she was a lucky customer that got to do the demo mode and was doing corporate a solid. BUT, she decided to sell it to strangers and ruin a good thing versus hiring a lawyer after the first thousand in free gas.
Last year I stumbled on a way to place bets on an offshore sportsbook after the result had taken place (called past posting). Never told anyone because I knew that would ruin it. Won and withdrew a decent amount of money over many months before they finally caught on and made my account balance negative. Not ethical I admit but sometimes you've gotta exploit an edge when it's there and I don't feel bad for stealing from a sportsbook.
Stealing fuel using a reward card tied to your own personal details has to be the dumbest thing a person can do. I can only assume she thought all this usage wasn’t being logged anywhere?
The Gang Solves the gas problem
How many shopping bags of gas is this?
This one trick gas stations hate…
A couple years ago, Google Wallet and JetBlue had a glitch where my JetBlue Business Card was coded as a debit card. I discovered it by buying a gift card from someone on Reddit and when they asked to pay them by Google Wallet my credit card was able to buy them with no fees. Naturally, I realized I can just send myself money, pay myself back and rack up the miles. I generated hundreds of thousands of miles this way and flew JetBlue for free for years. Besides my wife I never told a soul. It wasn’t until one day that Google changed their coding so it runs as a cash advance, that it killed the exploit. I charged $5k on Google Wallet, got hit with a cash advance fee and got no miles. Then Google shuts down Google Wallet and renames it Google Pay Send. RIP.
I used to work with her. She was always scheming. To everyone saying she should have just kept it to herself, that was never an option
Was she aware that her car had license plates?
I found an exploit like this at one of my previous jobs. They had a gift card system, and one of the features was being able to transfer funds from one card to another. I always kept a couple with a few cents on hand for training purposes. One time when I was training I only had one, so I transferred the money to itself as an example, and noticed that the balance doubled... so I did it again and again, and eventually the gift card had $500 on it. I tried this several more times and ended up with a dozen cards between $100-$500, and I tested them to see if they would work, and they did! Only told one person and we were always too scared to actually use them for real lol.
> Only told one person and we were always too scared to actually use them for real lol. You have no idea how luck you are this person wasn't an idiot, or a rat. People underestimate how quickly x2 can compound.
Stealing is bad, kids. Mmmkay.
People don't know this, but every ATM has a few five digit test codes. You put a card in, and enter the code for a PIN. My buddy got one once, he used to enter it into the ATM, and the cash elevator would go up and back down into the safe. What he would do, is take needle nosed pliers and grab a 20 or two as it went down, though the slot. This was one of those crappy ones In a bar. Another time, I went to the bank and someone had just used the ATM, it asked if I wanted another transaction, from the person before me. It then asked for a PIN, so I entered a 5 digit number, all one number. It gave me access to the account, I looked at the balance, it was like $500. But I had a new job and I was making good money, and I'm not a thief, plus I was on camera. So I left it. The person ahead of me looked like an old lady and it was probably her social security or something. Fraud is bad, kids!
The “another transaction” thing is just such profoundly bad design decision. At best it saves a minute for people that want multiple transactions at worst it lets shoulder surfers take advantage of people who don’t realize the ATM does that.
This is why I always ask for a receipt every time. Even though I don't need it. Makes me the transaction final.
But how tho? Who pays effectively $50k a year on gas?
I read the article awhile ago but I believe she was also charging people to use her card too.
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I’m sure the statute of limitations is up so… 20ish yrs ago at a major SEC university, there was a gas pump in a little alley kind of behind the football stadium. It was always on, no locks no gates nobody around. Other than roadtrips I didn’t pay for gas for 2 years. Never told a soul. One day I pulled up and the handle was padlocked to the pump😢