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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
If you’re poor and you exploit a loophole you receive a felony theft charge. If you’re rich enough you receive no repercussions and possibly a bonus.
No, this isn’t a loophole. She found a way to put the pump into maintence mode and set the price to zero. “The computer let me do it” isn’t much of an excuse. The self checkout at the grocery store lets me tare a steak like it’s bananas, but I’d definitely expect shopplifting charges if I got caught tricking the machine to charge me $0.40/lb for steak so I could fill my bag with steaks. There would be plenty of evidence that what I did was intentional and dishonest.
She exploited this glitch for $28k worth of gas in just 7 months, presumably for profit. That’s way more gas than a single vehicle would consume in that time.
This wasn’t a case of just paying what the screen said she owed. This was a case of gaining unauthorized access to the computer and adjusting the price to zero so she could steal at scale.
Yet when 2008 happened they got a bail out and a pat on the back. Trick a machine? Felony theft charge. Trick the American people? Bail out.
Two things can be true, and you can agree with one and disagree with the other.
She got greedy. Back when a buddy and I administered our SWIFT platform there were a couple of well publicized exploits of the system for millions. We discussed how easy it would be to write a script to randomly skim a fraction of a cent off of transactions over a long period of time, just don’t get greedy. No one cares about rounding errors.
If this lady stuck to random fillups for free once every couple of months she probably could have flew under the radar for years and more importantly had a better claim to ignorance if caught.
Not “presumably for profit”, definitely for profit. The article mentions one person that paid her $500 for about $700 worth of fuel in that 6 months because she was told it was a discount card. She was literally charging other people for the gas directly. And 7400 gallons of gas in 6 months, that’s well over 100k miles with a low ball estimate for fuel economy. She probably pocketed nearly 20k cash in that time.
At first I was with you but I was curious how she used $28,000 worth of gas and I’m kinda not with you anymore. I mean, has is expensive but let’s be realistic, no poor person is buying a year’s wages on gas over 6 months lol
“All told, the card was used 510 times, and more than 7,400 gallons of gas were pumped for free, the probable cause statement said.” The article also says she was letting other people pay her to use her card to get gas - so the gas pumped out free and they paid her a portion of what the gas would have been if they had paid the actual pump. That’s actually not the kind of thing I can really defend as just putting the poor people down.
Maybe they should fix their shitty ass software instead of arresting her?
Surely you don’t actually believe that the police officers that does the arresting are working a secondary job as software developers?
They didn’t arrest her. The cops did. If she didn’t want to be arrested, she probably shouldn’t have stolen tens of thousands of dollars worth of gas. She’s a thief, plain and simple. We can rail against a justice system that allows the rich to get away with crimes, while also recognizing that this woman is just a thief and there is no need to defend her.
They do this fun thing in the US for that its called “fucking shoot you”. I agree its all fucked up, but if you go an riot and respond with violence you just die dude. I don’t want somebody else raising my children because I got shot by the sheriffs patrol
if you can’t organize well enough to handle a local sheriff’s department, you’re pathetic. give me 5 well-armed and coordinated individuals and i’ll show you how to make the bastards scared of us.
EDIT: Lemmy is full of little bitch cowards and i’m not going to lose any sleep over the dystopia you limp-wristed fucks inherit.
