A Nebraska woman allegedly found a lucrative quirk at a gas station pump — double-swipe the rewards card and get free gas!
Unfortunately for her, you can’t do that, prosecutors said. The 45-year-old woman was arrested March 6 and faces felony theft charges accusing her of a crime that cost the gas station nearly $28,000.
Prosecutors say the woman exploited the system over a period of several months. Police learned of the problem in October when the loss-prevention manager at Bosselman Enterprises reported that the company’s Pump & Pantry in Lincoln had been scammed.
Seems to me like the reward was free gas.
If you’ve developed your system that the rewards card can provide a bypass to free fuel, your system is the flawed one and it isn’t on the customer to provide feedback. This isn’t a user testing scenario, they should have solved this bug before it went to production.
People aren’t responsible for cheaply built solutions.
If you’ve developed your system that the rewards card can provide a bypass to free fuel,
Why would any company design such an easy hack to give out free gas? It’s obviously a malfunction, which happen all the time.
Hell, even game developers rarely leave in consoles for cheat commands anymore in videogames, and giving those out don’t actually bankrupt the company they’re making the game for.
It’s not the customer’s responsibility to try to figure out why and make some determination if the too good to be true deal is real. If it gave it out for a penny, is that too much of a deal? What about half price? 1 penny discount? Where’s the line?
Regardless, I could see someone designing it as a feature because “nobody would ever swipe their card twice normally”.
Where’s the line?
I hope you don’t think that’s a new observation by any means. If you’re genuinely interested, why not look it up?
First off, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
Secondly, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_the_Clapham_omnibus
The man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical ordinary and reasonable person, used by the courts in English law where it is necessary to decide whether a party has acted as a reasonable person would. The term was introduced into English law during the Victorian era, and is still an important concept in British law. It is also used in other Commonwealth common law jurisdictions, sometimes with suitable modifications to the phrase as an aid to local comprehension.
The more general concept (the one in use in the US, for instance) is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
I’d like to see a lawyer who would argue that “any reasonable person living and functioning in society could conceivable construe that them taking 28 000 dollars worth of gas was definitely the system working as designed, and they were at no point aware that they were doing anything illlegal.”
Regardless, I could see someone designing it as a feature because “nobody would ever swipe their card twice normally”.
Ugh, really? In software development, or in developing anything that involves an end-user, such things are taken into consideration. Especially when there’s payment cards involved.
Quote by a forest ranger at Yosemite National Park on why it is hard to design the perfect garbage bin to keep bears from breaking into it: “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
