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.
If she was rich, the response would be, “congratulations!”, and if she was an LLC it would be a fine of… 5 percent?
And if there had been an error that charged people more rather than made gas free, it would have required a multiple-year-long class action lawsuit to resolve whereupon affected individuals would have received a few cents in compensation and a few lawyers would have come away much richer.
Yeah if it turned out my local gas station had been shorting 5% of every gallon for the past 3 years, I wouldn’t be getting back anything close to what they stole from me.
Sure this lady fucked up and took way too much free gas, but i have zero sympathy for the gas station.
Bullshit. Corpo’s build a system that users figure out and use? Sounds like they got caught with their pants down and have to make an example. Fucking trolls.
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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?
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?
$28,000 of gas in a few months? Yeah no shit. Find something like this and keep it to personal use if you must. Probably could’ve kept it under the radar or an amount small enough to settle without criminal charges if caught.
Yeah no shit. Find something like this and keep it to personal use if you must
Nah.
Figure out how it works, don’t use personal card, get a new one (getting a rewards card to someone who doesn’t actually exist shouldn’t be too hard), then exploit the fuck out of it.
Remember to use balaclava at the pump, and don’t use your own car.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say wouldn’t work anyway.
Stations have cameras.
Cars have plates.
They’d track the car to the owner and the owner would point fingers at who borrowed the car.
The camera would show the face of who was pumping the gas.
Just steal plates of another car. Not really a big deal or hard to pull off. And even without a mask, you can use just basic shades and ballcap.
I mean, the risk of getting caught is still very much there, but I’d say it’s very much lower than if you use your own plates, your own rewards car and a clear face.
What if you just went on foot with 5 gallon containers, didn’t do it frequently, and never went to the same gas station a second time?
It’s not easy to read license plates from normal CCTV cameras unless they are pointing at the right spot. I used to install them at gas stations and the owners were almost always surprised by this. The best they can usually get is make, model, and color. Maybe newer cameras are better but I’m guessing the vast majority are using cheap cameras.
Lots of extra work outside of the extra rewards card, when you all have to do is: wear a medical mask, and walk up and use fuel containers.
What is this weird Lemmy world? Are you seriously saying that you’d wear a mask at the pump (already a huge LOOK AT ME I’M SUSPICIOUS problem), use someone else’s car, drive to where your car is parked, then siphon the gas into your car…all to get a free tank of gas?
