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.
Please put me on that jury so I can vote not guilty.
“Stealing” from the ruling class is always okay because it’s not stealing, it’s reclamation.
there’s a very good chance that if you own a gas station that you are part of a very small percentage of wealth in your community. it may not be equal to the 1% of the global population, but the result is the same - you profit from the distribution of a product that is almost completely necessary for the working class to function.
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.
Receiving free gas is a function of the gas card. Responsibility lies with the company and team who designed the card, not with the woman who used the card as designed.
It’s not a gas card though, it’s a reward card.
Those are designed to give back at most some small % of your purchase if you use enough money.
If a security van crashed in front of you and spilled out gold, would you be allowed to take it because “it’s their responsibility to not crash”?
I’m all for fucking corporations, but your rhetoric seems flawed.
As always, it depends on what the courts say.
That said, yeah it kind of is on them not to crash. If I was on that jury, I would vote ‘not-guilty’ to anyone who picked up money that was laying around on the ground, especially if it’s public property.
My mom once paid a painter hundreds of dollars in cash, and he lost most of it when pulling his hand out of his pocket and the money blew away. Anyone who finds that money should get to keep it.
A bootlegger was acquitted in the US for killing his wife during Prohibition after he got out of jail and found out she sold all his stuff. He literally admitted to doing it and the jury said “not guilty” and cheered when the verdict was read.
it depends on what the courts say.
The court decide what laws are to be enforced, the laws being decided by the legislative part of the government, which is formed of the people, who are you.
So indirectly, our subjective morality decides what the courts say, indirectly. I’m asking what your innate sense would tell you to do in that hypothetical?
My mom once paid a painter hundreds of dollars in cash, and he lost most of it when pulling his hand out of his pocket and the money blew away. Anyone who finds that money should get to keep it.
Well, in transactional situations that would be pretty subjective. Who fudged it? Subjective. Depending on the sum, there could definitely be an argument.
And what if it was like an open check (btw checks are not a thing everywhere, I’ve seen maybe a dozen in my life and I’m 34, they’re so insecure we don’t use them) for a million dollars? With the value, it would definitely be different.
I think there are laws about lottery coupons as well. Different ones for different places in the world, but still.
Some of those laws say for instance you have to return it, but also that returning something very valuable gives you the right to a finder’s fee.
So “finder’s keeper’s” isn’t quite as simple as we’d like to.
In this specific instance, I really don’t mind someone having abused the system, but technically it would be at least a bit of fraud here. Tanking up once or twice for free would be an understandable happy accident, draining 28k worth of gas is clearly malicious and organised theft.
I don’t mind the occasional theft from corporations, but 28k is a bit beyond the normal robin hooding. Corporations suck currently but we can’t replace a thieving system with a system with even more thieving.
Casual thieving fine, but this is rather organised
Bad analogy, on multiple fronts. Better:
A truck is on its way to deliver gold to you (you have been told this is happening). When it gets to you, the driver hands you a gold bar. You say, “Thanks! Can I have another?” The driver hands you a second bar. Then you are charged with theft of the second bar, presumably because it was illegal to ask for it.
Not the same, because there’s a person who’s supposed to say “no”.
Yes, the computer is also supposed to say “no”, but surprisingly, laws don’t regard computers and people as being inherently the same thing when it comes to criminal liability.
More like you pay someone for gold. While delivering the gold to you, the gold delivery vehicle falls over and spills all the gold on the ground. Is it now yours?
Property laws exist for a reason. There’s even intangible property, like intellectual property. Although most IP laws are complete and utter bullshit, since they haven’t been around for nearly as long and have been lobbied to be whatever grotesque things they currently are.
And that wouldn’t necessarily be theft in your example, more like slight fraud, insofar that you’re basically convincing the driver (the automated computer in the real life example, which is why people and computer aren’t comparable, and now we have to consider this person to be some sort of mindless drone for the purposes of this hypothetical) that you are due two gold bars, even when you know it’s fraudulent and you’re only supposed to get one.
Because we all know the rewards system isn’t supposed to give out free gas. If you’re a person who’s cognitively capable of understanding what a rewards system is, you’re capable of understanding that.
What a reasonable person might do in that case is perhaps get gas free a few times, but there’s no way of arguing that a reasonable person took 28 000 dollars worth of gas without realising he was doing a serious crime.
Right, I just had this happen with a stove. I ordered one, guy came to deliver it, then said we have another in your name, do you want it? LoL
If you used a glitch to get a high score in a video game, should the developers be allowed to call the police on you?
Are you stealing someone’s property?
No. You’re playing a videogame.
If they accidentally left a hole in their code that allowed you an infinite money glitch in a large MMO, you probably wouldn’t be sued, as you’ve rather generated money than stolen it, despite it having real world value. However if you systematically abuse a gold thing, even making bots to do it for you, on a large scale, then it could be seen as criminal. (I believe Runescape has had cases like that.)
If they left a glitch in their system that allowed you access to their main server and you managed to easily get access to the whole company’s finances, should they be allowed to call the cops on you?
Most gas cards are designed to give out small rewards, this particular gas card was designed to give out bigger rewards.
If an ice cream scooper mistakenly gives one person a larger scoop than anyone else, I don’t blame the person with more ice cream, that’s obviously the responsibility of the ice cream scooper.
Designing a rewards card that functions correctly and a car crashing because presumably something has gone wrong are very different situations.
A deer didn’t kick the fuel pump, wires weren’t damaged in the register; everything worked as it was designed to, including the double swipe resulting in free gas.
That’s not how the rewards work though.
There’s basically an account to which you accumulate your entire spendings, and based off that, you’ll get a a few % off at most, in form of either a flat out discount or perhaps in some other form.
“Designing IT systems that function perfectly” is what you meant to say with “designing a rewards card that functions correctly”. Do you have any idea of how many technologies and codes and databases are interacting with such a “simple” thing as showing your rewards card to a reader? I’m guessing not.
“Everything worked as it was designed to”
So you think someone designed a system to give out free gas? What a great business model. Perfect design, isn’t it?
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.
I totally agree and share this sentiment among MMOs.
If you design your game or product like shit and there are exploits, it’s YOUR FAULT for designing it with exploits, not the customer’s fault for actually using them.
If they don’t like it, then they can do better.
Please put me on this jury. Fastest not-guilty verdict ever.
What’s your address and how good is your home security system?
I mean if I can find a way to get into your house and rob you without immediately getting caught, I shouldn’t be convicted even if the cops later find evidence later. Right?
Sorry but how is this not on the system, let alone a crime?
This slope is slick, if she is guilty of theft due to a system error then whats to stop them from saying the price you bought something at was an “error” later?
And lets face it, swiping a card 2 times breaking your system tells me that you should get better QA not charge someone.
Sorry but how is this not on the system, let alone a crime?
This slope is slick, if she is guilty of theft due to a system error then whats to stop them from saying the price you bought something at was an “error” later?
It comes down to intent. The reality is that she probably knew that what she was doing was wrong. I mean, come on, do you really think she thought she was supposed to get 7000 gallons of free gas? We aren’t talking about her doing it once and not realizing it.
We can debate whether she should be held accountable, but there’s no slippery slope here and let’s not pretend that she is some innocent victim getting swept up in the whims of some evil corporations trying to trick people so they can send them to jail. She stole gas and she knew it, and probably thought that she could get away with it.
Where did anyone say this person was an innocent victim? No one is debating she took advantage here, the issue is no one seems to be putting any culpability on the company who made the pump. The issue here is a slippery slope as it expects a duty to report the error from her that should not be there legally. I could see some other charge like fraud be appropriate maybe, but theft is such a bad thing to charge her with.
Where did anyone say this person was an innocent victim?
Explicitly? Nowhere. But for this to be a slippery slope to innocent victims being held criminally accountable for malfunctioning technology, she has to be.
no one seems to be putting any culpability on the company who made the pump.
Is this a joke? This comment section is awash with people saying they fucked up, so she had the right to take advantage of it. I sidestepped this question intentionally, and specifically addressed the claim that punishing her for this would almost inevitably lead to actual innocent people being punished.
The issue here is a slippery slope as it expects a duty to report the error from her that should not be there legally.
She’s not being held legally responsible for not reporting it, she is being held responsible for it for exploiting it to steal tens of thousands of dollars worth of gas.
The poster made the claim that it’s some slippery slope from her intentionally exploiting a system to fraudulently get free gas, to people being held criminally responsible when a piece software glitches. I pointed out this makes no sense…and this makes me trained to be a pathetic self?
Lol you are truly one of the great thinkers of our time.
If I make a self serve machine and tell everyone to use it who’s responsibility is it to ensure it’s functionality? The customer?
This would be I think more like if a staff member was not charging for gas to turn all the blame on the customers who benefited.
There’s no change to the expectation in this transaction… “I swiped my card twice, it broke the process that is supposed to happen, the proprietor does not know that this is happening, I’m not going to tell them, I guess I can just exploit this forever with no ramifications”. What’s that? The security barrier in this shop is broken? I guess everything is free now.
This happens once, that’s an oopsie freebie, you do this every time for months then that is a pattern of criminal behave. You don’t just get to take stuff because the process has broken down, and any company has the explicit right to seek recompense from you.
I mean if the pump is set up not to force you to pay before pumping gas and you just pump gas and leave that’s obviously theft.
They’ll prove that she knew what she was doing. They’ll prove she knew that she was supposed to pay for the gas. They’ll prove that she did the double swipe to get the gas. But probably more damning, if that $28,000 figure is right in 6 months she wasn’t just getting herself free gas.
It’ll be interesting to hear more details like do they know that it was her every time and not other people. If she told other people how to double swipe and get the gas that’s probably fine. Maybe she was giving other people her card and instructions on how to do it that’ll be interesting to see how it plays out in court if she doesn’t settle.
Settle? this is a criminal case not a civil one. Maybe they will plead to something lesser, but ether way it is very bad precedent.
The issue here, is that someone took advantage of a broken pos system and now they are being charged. If this stands you now have the base to potentially charge anyone who uses a broken piece of tech, and tech is getting crappier and crappier by the day.
It does not matter if she took advantage or what the motive was. The underling issue is that now users can be on the hook for bad products. That is terrifying.
What about the reverse? Exploiting a security vulnerability and getting access to sensitive data that you then use for financial gain shouldn’t be a crime? Going into a house with poor quality locks and stealing things?
I’m not trying to side with big corporations here but I think you’re getting the precedent issue the wrong way around. If the actions of that person weren’t a crime, it’d be a bigger problem.
The underlying issue, that people are pushed into theft out of desperation, is far worse. I make no moral judgement of this person because I don’t know their circumstances. But I don’t think whether it is a crime or not can really be debated.
If it was a once or twice or even occasional thing, you have a point - but if she keeps going back and doing it constantly, rather than alerting the owner/management of the issue, and ends up making off with $20k+ that’s when it crosses the line into theft.
If you do it once, good for you. If you do it repeatedly, also good for you. But if you “used 510 times, and more than 7,400 gallons of gas were pumped for free”( in only a 7 month period), I don’t know what you expect. You’re going 2-3 times a day getting 14gal every time.
That should be the illegal part. Taking advantage of a loophole should not be illegal. Charging other people so that you can take advantage of the loophole, on the other hand, is a scam.
No, charging other people so that you can take advantage of a loophole is called Tax Preparation
So what? Why do we cheer when regular people get caught abusing the system while the ruling class does it every single day?
I think most of ya’ll are just jealous while thinking you’re “so much smarter than her” because you wouldn’t have been caught.
Children, the lot of you.
Seriously.
Once, ahhh whatever, corporate needs to fix their shit.
A dozen times, that’s getting cheeky, but I could understand a ‘fuck the man’ attitude.
When you get seven thousand gallons of anything for free, that’s just regular theft. The fact nobody stopped you is not an excuse. You might as well have walked into a car dealership and drove one off the lot. No shit that’s a felony.
Y’know the tanker trucks that deliver gas to the station? Those only hold about 10,000 gallons. That’s how much gasoline this lady stole.
