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.
To all the people defending her, how is this different than just pumping and driving away? You could always pump first and pay inside later, and it works on the honour system. In this case she clearly intentionally circumvented paying.
It’s different in that they gave her a card that says “here is a discount”.
If you go into a store, pay with a stack of coupons from that store and walk out with a free chicken, can the store come back and charge you with a felony because they made a mistake and claim they didn’t really mean to print the coupon?
How far can this go? Buy a car on sale and then get arrested for not paying the full price afterwards? “The customer should have known the deal was too good.”
Swiping the card twice puts the machine into maintenance mode where she manually adjusted the price to zero. That’s pretty straightforward theft.
If you’re putting maintenance mode behind 2 normal swipes I don’t understand how that isn’t your fault
If she went to a gas station one time and swiped her card and it gave her free gas, it’s reasonable to think that she might have assumed the discount gave her free gas on the first use. This wouldn’t be an issue.
When she’s using it to get over $20,000 in gas, selling gas to others by using her double swipe technique, that falls well outside the reasonable bounds of an honest mistake.
So no, there is no slippery slope where you’re going to be locked up for a store misapplying a coupon or whatever.
