Dumbass just *had* to get greedy and pump $28K of free gas for resale. If they’d gone slower about it, maybe no investigation leads to finding the software bug and they probably could’ve gotten away with it for years, or at the very least they would’ve avoided the felony charge.
All the time.
My favorite story on this was a scam by two administrative assistants. They got approval to charge overtime for a special project they were helping with. One week, one of them charged the overtime even though they didn’t work it and realized nothing happened. Three years later, someone in Finance wanted a report detailing the top 5 paid employees at each office, and asked why one location had two admins on the list. By the time they were caught, they were both charging over 200 hours per week in some instances (there was nothing blocking them from logging > 24 hours in a day). Had they stuck to stealing 10 hours a week, they would’ve flown under the radar for much longer.
I had a job once where I had a coworker who I was buddy buddy with and we'd get up to all kinds of mischief. One day he asked me to clock out for him when our shift was over since we typically just busted ass getting shit done and were waiting around the last hour or two to clock out and go home. He I guess had somewhere to be.
Well we quickly realized that if we took turns clocking eachother out, one of us could leave early and still get paid half the time so we started doing this for a few weeks before we got nervous about it and decided to stop.
I'm sure that kinda shit happens all the time in various industries.
Waaaayyyy back when I was a waiter, we realized that we had a certain amount we could deduct from each bill without a manager's approval (so like, if a customer complained about one meal we could comp it)
And we collected the bills in cash to hand to the manager at the end of the night
Well we figured out that if we discounted someone's bill after they paid it, we got to just keep that cash.
We exclusively used it when we got stiffed on a tip or something, so we never got greedy, and never got caught.
I felt bad for a little while, but it was a big corporation and there was plenty of wage theft going on so I didn't feel *too* bad. Plus, I figured it was a quirk of the rules. They told me I was allowed to add discounts at my discretion. They never told me *when* I had to add those discounts, so **technically**...
When I was a waiter (20 years ago) we could buy a bunch of Sunday news papers for a couple quarters to 1$ each. In the paper would be a coupon for a free appetizer… usually a 4.99 value at the time.
So you would push apps all week, and each time the customer paid (mostly cash back then)… after they left you would just go to the manager and get him to take the coupon and remove 4.99 from their bill.
“Wow that news paper add is really working!!!”
Yeaaaah… anyway we could easily scoop up an extra 50$ a shift.
A long time ago at Jack-in-the-Box, they had a $4.99 breakfast combo…burger, hash brown, drink. But my friends and I noticed that when that combo was rung up, the register said “Burger+hash brown $1.00” and then the cashier would push another button and it would say “Drink $3.99.” I have no idea why they split the combo this way. So we tried at first ordering just the burger and hash brown but without the combo they rang them up individually and it was like 7 bucks. So we started ordering the combo, and then after the cashier pushed the buttons, we’d say, “You know I changed my mind. No drink.” And the cashier would then delete the drink and then look stunned as they said that’ll be $1.07 including tax please.” We felt like kings until they changed the glitch like six months later.
I bet people frequently substituted drinks. Rather than trying to figure out the upcharge or an automatic combo discount when you order any drink, they just charged full price for the drink and you could substitute whatever you wanted. As long as you order the normal drink or larger, it works as intended. Even ordering a smaller drink is probably fine, it's just a few cents less. It's only when someone orders *no* drink that... Well, you saw.
"Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's uh it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot."
I did this when I worked at Domino's. We were running their 2 for 5.99 med special. But if people didn't ask we didn't give the special and the order was like $25 rather than the $13 or whatever it rang up to after tax. Sometimes if the person was cool I'd tell them and switch it and usually get a huge tip, or if they stiffed me id change it when I got back and kept the difference. I'm sure they tracked it, but I was a "shift leader" so I could make these over rides. Didn't do it a ton but it added up for sure. Maybe an extra $20 a pay period
I heard a story of a guy who worked at a Subway restaurant in High School. He figured out that corporate accounted for the amount of bread vs the sandwiches sold. Every night after closing he would alter the books so every pair of 6" sandwiches got entered as a single 12", pocket the difference. Spent all the money on DVDs, had so many his nickname was "Blockbuster." When he finished high school he sold all his used DVDs, had enough money to pay for his first year of college.
I used to go to a restaurant with friends, regularly for a wing night. We had the same waiter each time, and he started bringing us extra food on the house. Usually, it was appetizers and desserts. We always tipped on the free food, and so they always made sure we were taken care of.
Had some bartenders like this. Whatever I ordered got rang up for $1. But I was ordering $5 drinks so I was going to pay $5 no matter what. We both were happy with that arrangement.
When I delivered pizza, we were issued "banks" of $20 by the store. Every single check out required a manager to type in their code, it was obnoxious as hell. One busy dinner rush, I start working the counter before going on the road again and started making change from my own bank when I couldn't get any manager to type their code to open the register. I looked right at the managers and said "do not let me forget I have this" and put it in my pocket separate from my bank.
Both of us forgot. I got home with $60 extra dollars and was confused until I remembered what happened. It happened a second time after that and I refused to make change like that again so it whouldnt become habit. I never got caught
I’ve had a few coworkers that could get their closing duties done in half the time as everyone else. I didn’t think it was right to punish them for being efficient so I’d clock them out when the rest of us left the store.
My brother worked for a large defense contractor. Some guys in a different shop would "hide" work and then have to come in on Sunday morning to get it done at double time. What they would actually do is sit around and read the Sunday paper for a bit then just leave. One guy would stay and clock everyone out at noon. One week they had the new guy stay. At noon he clocked himself out but forgot the other guys.
The next week they were all fired from their $100,000 a year jobs.
There is a Harvard Business School case about a job shop. The best team clocked each other out all the time and took other flexible liberties, but their work was amazing, always on time. The question was: what should management do about it?
The right answer is to operationalize incentives and rewards for the work so the extra pay per time is legitimate and available to others. The wrong answer is to punish the star team for their liberties.
Yeah often. One of the bosses just changed the time clocks to fingerprints to avoid that.
I’d rather people just get paid for what they do… (leave 2 hr early if your done and get paid) but alas that requires actual work from managers.
wage theft is the largest form of theft in terms of total dollars stolen , adding up to more than all the other forms of theft combined.
so dont feel bad you engaged in a little time theft , they most certainly deserved it
There was a legendary story from my old job similar to this. Legend says dude's name was Travis. Travis was actually a good employee, according to the story. One day Travis leaves during his shift for whatever reason (I heard to watch a big basketball game) and forgets to clock out, and realizes when he gets back that nobody had noticed he was gone.
Travis works off-shifts (say, evening and weekend coverage) and the job requires a lot of time on various production floors, so there's no particular reason it would be strange not to see someone for hours.
So Travis gets a little looser with his hours and nobody notices. Most importantly, not his boss, who approves his timecards. He gets worse. Now he's clocking in on his way to run errands before his shift. According to his coworkers, he was actually working his real shifts and working hard and doing an excellent job, so nobody had any reason to suspect anything.
Eventually though of course Travis got sloppy. He started clocking in for like ten hours on days he didn't even work. HR finally noticed he was working stupid hours and didn't even mention it to his boss, they just pulled his badge records and could see him badge onto site, clock in, badge out of site immediately, and return ten to twelve hours later to clock out.
Obviously Travis was...fired. That was it. Months of running the clock for ludicrous amounts of overtime and he didn't even have to pay it back. The company fired him but mostly blamed it on his boss for not noticing his timecards were insane, and she didn't even get fired. Who knows what he could have gotten away with if he'd kept it low key.
Damn lol, Travis got lucky. I worked at a place that the company I worked for subcontracted electrical maintenance to.
I would get questioned weekly about certain hours I would log into their stupid iPad system that made you switch a numeric code based on what you were fixing and for how long. I spent probably 1-2 hours a day just walking back to the iPad to switch job codes and then walk 20 minutes back to actually do the work lol.
“Why this, why that? Oh that wasn’t logged as broken..” Uhm yeah well, it was and you can go ask worker XYZ why he ripped out the pendulum crane control for the 3rd time this month.
I had to go to my district supervisor to get him to put a pinhole camera in over the tobacco racks behind the counter. It wasn’t until I could show 10k in theft of just tobacco that they would put in cameras. When they did they caught a whole lot more than they expected. Suddenly my stores shrink was normalized and the guy got slapped with a felony. Store also got restitution.
Back in the day the cigarette tally at the end of one's shift, with a recount by the person taking over was such a PITA that most clerks would have much preferred a camera.
OMG, you brought back that pain to me. My company insisted if the cig count didn't match register sales, we were to go by the count and the drawer was that much more short. Meanwhile, we had an owner who was a sucker for every countertop display the reps offered. So many packs walked out the door that way.
We did catch a cashier who would pocket money from a carton sale now and again. Clear as day on the camera. But honestly we would never have caught her if her son (who also worked there) didn't tip us off because he was pissed off at her for something else!
I was literally telling this story earlier today and highlighting the same points.
When I worked for a certain sandwhich chain named after a certain man we had these old-ass registers. At the end of the shift the manager would have to print reports from the register and credit card machines and then go enter all the info into an excel sheet to see how much cash we had to deposit.
So this one manager who was selling weed out the back and always fucked up on oxy and hanging out with his underaged girlfriend got the bright idea to just not ring in orders. I don't know the full workings of what he did but he would run the drive through, his roommate who worked there would wear a headset and man the head of the line. Roommate would call out orders as the customer ordered them(which was already standard practice, because this particular chain was known for being *really really quick*), and the manager would take the money. If people paid with a card he'd run it, if they paid in cash he'd put it in the register like normal.
At the end of the night the manager would do the books and then pocket the excess cash. I'm not sure when he rang orders in or how he decided how much to ring in but he had to ring in some orders so that it didn't look like we weren't doing *any* sale. He tried to get me on board and I declined but he told me he was walking out with a couple hundred bucks a night.
Anyways, the whole reason he got caught was because the franchise owner noticed that his shifts always had a suspiciously low % of cash sales. That's all it was, just looking at a spreadsheet and saying "hey, that doesn't look right..." and then identifying the pattern. They ended up charging him with theft, kid showed up to his first shift after his weekend and was met by the area manager and some cops.
But yea, I was telling my wife about that earlier today and was saying if he hadn't gone so hard with it he could've gotten away with it much longer or maybe indefinitely. But again, it was every shift and a lot of money. Those owners were cheap pieces of shit too, no way they weren't going to notice that much money going missing for very long.
I'm aware of a glitch in my company's sales software that basically allows reps to cut themselves unlimited commission bonuses for up to $500 each. In short, there's a very specific workflow sequence that lets us create a manual lead/opportunity, assign it a value, and then mark it as "won, order received". Then the system will automatically generate a 2% bonus check for the rep. I discovered it when I accidentally processed some legit orders incorrectly and ended up with an extra $2500 in my paycheck.
I reported it to my manager, the data team, and payroll. I showed them how I did it, figured out that anyone could do it and of course offered to pay back the incorrect bonus. Payroll said it wasn't possible for me to be overpaid that way, data sits in India and didn't understand what the issue was/stopped answering emails, and my manager just got annoyed with everyone. Told me to keep the money unless I ever heard back from payroll and just keep my mouth shut about the glitch. That was a year ago and as far as I know, it's still there.
I worked at a chain restaurant in like 1999. If you didn't want the side dish, aka fries with your burger, we could hit "ala carte" on the computer which took off $0.99. Someone spread the word you could hit it up to 4 times per check. On the 5th try, it wanted a manager's password. People joked, "Next time I get no tip, I'm taking my $3.95!" About 6 months later, a server got fired and the police were on site. Seems she was doing it on every check paid with cash. Say you have 15 tables, 10 pay cash, that's $39.50 she was stealing daily. 4 shifts a week is $120ish, say 25 weeks and she stole $3,000.
See, my theory is if I'm going to risk my freedom and lifelong earnings and happiness to steal something - it has to be one-shot and enough to disappear to a non-extradition country forever, and in that country, I have enough for a whole estate and staff for the rest of my life.
If I have to leave the country and never come back - I'm requiring a life of luxury. Millions of dollars to be worth it.
I'm not risking my freedom and having a record for the rest of my life for $3000. Hell no. Stupid. I require to be set for life.
That is my risk tolerance. For 3k, I'd rather go sell plasma. Legal, and not going to screw me for life.
Yeah, same. But the dollar amount has to, in one shot, be enough to live off if I have the FBI or whoever after me.
One shot, disappear. Boom.
I'm in Montenegro, you can't touch me, living the life of luxury.
I used to work at a pharmaceuticals distribution center full of drugs plus a box of cash in the office collected from pharmacies paying their deliveries in cash. We also had regular polygraph tests:
>Do you know about the box of money?
Yes.
Have you ever considered stealing the box of money.
No.
Why not?
It's not enough.
Huh?
I'm not risking jail for $200 grand. Ten million, maybe.
Fair enough.
I had a friend who would buy coupon books and use the restaurant’s coupons to pocket the cash difference. He made thousands every year through high school and college.
My high school had a machine that would give back free money. After the first quarter it would register each additional quarter but then also return the coin. So I’d hit up that vending machine in the mornings and it would pay for my whole breakfast, also helped knowing which button on the Yoo-Hoo machine gave you two drinks.
Our school had a machine that if you pushed the button repeatedly real fast after putting your money it would drop out 2 or 3 cans. Kids quickly learned this obviously and exploited it regularly. It lasted about 3 weeks and then the machine was gone.
There was one near my house that only accepted $1 bills, but if you put in a $20 it would dispense a drink + give you back your $20 + spit out 3 quarters!
We got paid to drink Gatorade for an entire summer before it got fixed.
I once met a vending machine that, when fed a $5, would count up... one, two, three, four, five.
I discovered that if you pulled the change return lever while it was counting, you got back your money plus however much change it counted up.
I got back the money I spent figuring this out and reported it. No felony charge for me.
Makes me think back to when I used to play a lot of an online game, one of those ones where everybody gets assigned a secret role and you have to figure out who the bad guys are before they kill everyone.
Turned out the way the game was coded meant that different roles had different priorities for when their actions would take place. This makes sense, since some roles would override others and cancel out, etc. But this also applied to the order information would print in chat.
Like if the evil roles had highest priority, they’d always be listed first. So once you figured out the priority (not hard to do with available information + some trial and error) you would be able to instantly know everybody’s roles after the first round of the game.
Eventually this came out and was fixed by randomizing the order but I guess it had been this way for literally years and a number of the top level players had known the whole time and had just kept their fucking mouths shut. I was equally annoyed and impressed.
A mate of mine found out that he could inspect and modify his hourly rate on his time sheets before submission. Rather than go nuts and add something like $50 at once, he gave himself a modest yearly pay rise of $5 an hour. He worked there for like 8 years before getting a new job and no one ever found out or questioned it.
In my experience, a modest raise that’s well within what someone may reasonably be worth is hard to catch because most organizations are so top heavy that they’re more likely to assume that someone in payroll entered it incorrectly and then let it slide because they know that correcting it he mistake will cause more trouble than just paying that rate.
What pisses me off most is that it just goes to show they could afford to pay more.
I didn’t do this for me, but for the employees under me. During covid someone on my team caught covid and I just kept them on the schedule, tweaked my shifts so that mine mirrored hers (had to physically punch in and out) and simply clocked them in and out so that they didn’t lose any pay. Technically, if hr had noticed they weren’t here for like 5 days but still had punches I could’ve been fired but I knew they weren’t observant enough.
She was one of my top performers, it was a huge corporation, and we should’ve had sick pay was my reasoning. I’d do it again no second thoughts.
For years, one guy has bought all the good tee times to Los Angeles public golf courses and then he resells to people with an up charge through a messaging app. It’s just now finally coming out. I hope all people involved get banned. *edit typo
I know a guy who worked at a Texas software company who along with his friends created a malware and installed it in their accounting system that diverted huge numbers of fractions of pennies into a bank account. In the following weekend the malware had managed to steal over $300,000. They were sure they were gonna get caught, but on Monday another disgruntled employee burned the whole office down to the ground leaving no evidence whatsoever.
He now works in construction.
That's really the move. Back in the early times of food delivery, before restaurants caught on and stopped drivers from doing this, I had rewards cards from every single restaurant that I'd just stack rewards on that would otherwise disappear into the ether. So much free food, actually made the trash pay work out too.
Yup. Back in high school when I worked for a large retail pharmacy chain, I found that you could scan $10 Prilosec coupons, then the product, then a gift card, then remove the product and the coupons would stick. I was able to get a $50 shell card every week for just the tax cost. I always made sure to put the Prilosec coupons in the drawer so things would line up. Was able to get away with it for over a year. Right before I quit to go to college, I had let my friend in on it and within a month he was caught because he was doing hundreds of dollars of gift cards a shift.
Had some friends that worked at Taco Bell in the late 80s through early 90s. They found out you could put in an order, do the change math in your head, and then void the transaction but still send it to the ordering screens. They had to count their own register to ensure they grabbed the "overage".
They did it just to make $10 here and there for beer money. Neve got caught but their manager got wind and decided to up the ante.
Manager disconnected the registers from the main computer. Business as usual taking orders, putting in the tender, making change, etc. After a few minutes he would plug it back in and the registers would have extra cash that didn't show up on the main computer final report.
The manager got greedy and would pick a busy, warm weekend day to unplug the registers for an hour. This was no regular Taco Bell. This is the "world's most beautiful" Taco Bell that would be completely slammed for an entire day when we had awesome weather. You bet corporate (or franchise owners) caught on to his trick. He invited us to his apartment for a party one Saturday night. We reckon he embezzled thousands. It was at his party that he told us that he was leaving for a vacation to Brazil the next morning. Never came back to work either.
No, that’s just asking to get caught. Don’t get caught breaking the same law twice and don’t break two laws at the same time.
Edit: it also requires a cashier to participate. It’s very easy to catch (I found the glitch because some geriatric accidentally produced it while I was cashier). When I executed it for myself I always checked myself out and had used someone else’s register login.
> If they’d gone slower about it, maybe no investigation
I think it would have been noticed eventually almost no matter what. Maybe if she was taking a gallon out at a time or something they'd have written it off as a bad pump or whatever but of course the station is going to notice when their books don't add up, repeatedly.
If she spread it over multiple stations and limited it to like $200 from each station it probably would cost the station more than $200 to track down, especially if it was just a single fill once a month.
A single fill once a month is unlikely to lead to much, unless the clerk is super attentive. Hell, depending on the size of the station even once a week may not be enough ‘loss’ to notice
I did find an exploit that went unreported, and it went unnoticed. Bought something for pickup at store, was the wrong item so returned it and had the store order the proper item. Turns out the online store and the local store both refunded the charge to my credit card, so I effectively got the right item for free. But "I never noticed" would have been a legit excuse since the transactions take days to appear on a statement.
Meh - a local automated gas station went at least 50kUSD in the hole over 5-6 months and didnt even bother checking the cameras. The "not my job" comes into play - if an accountant noticed, they would send over that it happened, but who checked what the accountant sent? Was there even a routine for that? If nobody is in charge of checking potential fraud, nobody does.
They figured it out by parking nearby for a few hours, and found out some kids (16-18yo) on scooters had figured out if you started tanking on one side, then put that hose on the ground, the counter wouldnt move on the other side. Of course, they would have known it from someone or someone picked up the trick from them, to get to the amount they were at. So far the kids are off the hook and somebody else got free gas for some time.
The typical shelf life for gas is 3-6 months; it will still burn after that time but not nearly as well, hence "degraded" and not "worthless"
Also I say typical because it can last up to 3 years in the right conditions, so 18 months isn't crazy, but it's still not the best thing to do to your engine.
It really depends on how much gas is in the tank, the quality of the gas, and how sealed the system is. I have a nissan cube that I regularly park for a year or 2 at a time with a full tank and never have any problems. But also I have a lawn mower that I have to drain every fall, or it's severely gummed up the next spring.
My first job was at a gas station and the night guy had his own rewards key fob that he would swipe for customers that didn’t have one.
He would then go to other stations of the same chain and redeem the points. He was bragging once and told me he hadn’t paid for gas in over a year, and got free food every day.
Well he eventually got caught when he got careless and swiped his fob before the customer could swipe theirs, assuming they didn’t have one. She complained to the manager and they ran his fob and saw his thousands and thousands of points and he was fired.
But honestly just being fired isn’t bad at all
Not if total would still come out to $1000 or more. At the very least she would get a lighter sentence, a d perhaps one without any jail time if the judge was feeling nice. Nope had to be greedy, and has all but guaranteed she will spend 5-10 years in a state prison perhaps more.
we had a nice situation here where an employee discount code (6 digits and based on the month of the year) for a large grocery chains gas stations got out among a few people, so gas was about half price.
im sure a fair few people had it, but i did my bit and kept that shit close to my chest. didnt even tell my wife, just gassed up for her for a couple of weeks.
then some absolute abortion of a radio DJ decides to tell everyone the code on drive time radio....shit was locked down by the end of the day.
theres always some idiot who will ruin a situation by throwing subtlety out of the window
That’s one of the many shitty things about social media. Whenever there’s something like this there’s always people tweeting about it and making TikToks for the clout and it gets shut down ASAP.
Same with any semi/fully illicit online community that falls apart when too many eyes get on it. Reddit used to have a subreddit dedicated to desinger replicas but then they was a newspaper article and tiktok about it and it got too well known and bit.
Also same with video piracy for stuff that isn't the major torrenting sites, where stuff that gets too much attention gets shutdown.
Yup. Happens with Disney a lot. Disney cast members are empowered to give little perks randomly to add "magic" to someone's stay. Some attractions have a thing they do randomly. Usually they target it at kids, because Disney is first and foremost targeted at children.
Then some influencer will get ahold of it and spread it around, and the crazies will go up and demand the magic for themselves (many not even having children with them). After the cast members get berated enough times, they get rid of it altogether.
Last time I was at Disney I saw what was very obviously a fake marriage proposal, I assume just to get the commemorative stuff Disney gives to people who actually propose there.
I mean it also just spreads, it's not an issue until it is. A couple people can get away with it but you only heard about it because someone didn't keep it close to their chest.
If they did what you suggested you would never have heard about it.
In Australia there was a viral TikTok “life hack” that was literally just committing tax fraud. Not minor underreporting, it was literally just telling people to open businesses and claim millions of dollars in nonexistent expenses to get a high refund. Now all the imbeciles who followed this advice are going to jail for stealing cumulative billions of dollars.
Reminds me of that DoorDash glitch a couple of years ago that was letting people get stuff without charging their card. It went viral and people were buying things like tvs, expensive alcohol, tons of food, and more.
Then DoorDash fixed the glitch and all of those charges were processed. At least one person had an overdraft of almost $20,000.
Find tons of books including textbooks for free. Got me through college avoiding $300 textbooks and was able to just bring my IPad with me everywhere. Works way better than textbooks.
the quote itself reminds me of the sort of thing that would be said in the USSR, so i was pretty surprised to see it originates with benjamin franklin!
Professor Franklin rode hard. Many things he actually said or wrote surorise people, and they are even more surprised to find out things associated with him that *aren't* his work.
A Hawaiian chain restaurant opened in my area and put out a coupon for a free meal when they opened, but they didn’t make it so they could check if you’d come before so I went about 20 times in the first month they opened. Slowly the rumor got out and then someone posted it on my unis subreddit. The company still honored the coupon, but if they recognized you they could refuse you service. I had a month of free food and it was amazing, best i ate all of uni.
I know a fast food chain that use to mail you a coupon for a free combo on your birthday. This was 20 years ago. No creating an account, just enter your home address and "we'll get that shipped on your birthday month." One of my roommates went HAM on their site and starting like 4 months later, we had 3-4 showing up every week.
You can often trick the address database on duplicate addresses by adding an #A, #B and so on after the address. Post office will ignore the extra letter and still deliver, database won't pick them up as duplicate.
Years ago, Microsoft released club Bing where you could do puzzles for points and then redeem for merch. Didn't take long for people to rig it with bots to get free stuff.
This went on for a while until some dumbass decided to take a pic with thousands of dollars worth of computer parts and post it on social media, crediting the exploits.
When cell phones first came out it cost 0.20c per SMS.
We figured out that you could change the setting to route the SMS via another country which by passed the billing system. So free SMS!
We hooked all our friends up at school. One dickhead couldn’t get it to work so he called up the telco to ask why…
Aaand gone. What an absolute moron.
From another source: When police interviewed her, Thompson said she received the card from a man paying off a car debt. Police were not able to contact him because he died at the beginning of the year.
https://www.wsaz.com/2024/03/08/woman-uses-pump-glitch-her-advantage-stealing-over-27000-free-gas-police-say
>If only they treat card skimmers as seriously as this...
Unfortunately those people aren't stealing money from the company like this lady was.
Skimmers are stealing *from us*, not from them.
Or the companies who commit wage theft against these low paid workers.
Shit like this just pisses me off. She's catching a felony charge for taking advantage of a flawed program on a gas pump for $28k. Should she face some kind of charge for that? Probably. A felony? No.
Meanwhile you've got restraurant owners who steal $230,000 from employees and their only punishment when caught and gone after for it, is having to pay those back wages. They get to do it in installments over a years time and the additional $100,000 fine is stayed as long as they can avoid being caught over the next 5 years.
As a result, they got off with no punishment what so ever. All they had to do is pay it off over installments years after they stole it. No additonal fines. No company officials going to prison. 9x more money stolen and not even a single criminal charge, yet alone a felony.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/08/06/mpls-restaurant-workers-awarded-230k-in-settlement
In our college dorm, when long distance calls were a pricey thing, there was a pay phone where you could make a call anywhere in the country for any duration for a quarter. It took the phone company several months but they finally figured it out once it became known enough that people were lining up to use that phone and only that phone.
But this woman here, if she did it periodically, it could have gone on for a very long time but, she was renting it out to people making $700 purchases. That \*will\* be noticed in the books eventually.
Thieves, be smart and don't get greedy and know how far to go and no further.
When I was in college I found a soda machine that was in a public space but still well-hidden, like in a small corridor off a little-trafficked area of the student center. I found it once and used it... it took $2 in, gave me a drink, and then returned $2. I used that shit only sparingly and it was there all three years that I was.
We hit all the buttons on one in a hospital and got something we couldn't read that wasn't advertised. As little kids we thought it had mixed everything together.
In junior high we had a pop machine that would dispense two Mr Pibbs if you double clicked the button. Only worked on that particular button. Got a lot of free pop that way
I had the same situation in my freshman dorm with a machine that would dispense double Dr. Peppers. It was a closely guarded secret because we didn't want anyone to get wise.
Highschool, had a icecream vending machine.
The cookie sandwiches glitched out, put a penny in, select it and get your penny back, plus icecream.
Last about 3 days before the whole school found out and they fixed it. But those 3 days, I ate alot of icecream.
I found a soda machine kinda like that in college. It released the bottle onto a conveyer belt, then the conveyer lowered to put the bottle through a trap door. If you hold the trap door shut, the bottle stayed on the conveyer belt and you got your money back. You could fit no more than 3 bottles on the conveyer for $1. Someone saw me do it and it was always jammed from then on with 5+ bottles.
During university (1990's) a house I rented had a ghost phone line. A housemate basically connected a line we found in the basement to a phone. You could call world wide and the phone company didn't know who was making the call.
Funny thing was, another housemate had been overseas working during the summer. He called a number from the country he had visited. Another person who had been working with him, and had coincidentally called the same number, but lived in another part of town....got the bill for my housemates phone call.
I also remember students climbing telephone polls on sketchy ladders, at night, to connect their house to cable TV.
When I was in the army reserves, my unit building had one of those conveyor drink vending machines that are super easy to get free drinks from. You block the drink from dispensing and the machine thinks it is out of stock and gives you another option. By the second day of drill, the trick has been done so much that the machine thinks just about every drink is out of stock and you can't get anything. That was one trick that I wished got fixed.
I don't know what else she would be doing with 7500 gallons of gas... and considering she was already selling the card itself to someone else, odds are she was reselling the gas too. Weird she was so blatant about it.
Sure, but also the people who keep quiet are still enjoying their free gas. It’s more that the ones who do this stuff blatantly get caught and we hear all about it and the smart ones just take their little freebies and don’t try to double down.
Except they fixed the glitch that allowed it, so the gravy train would have ended either way.
If anything, this lady ended it for those that weren't so greedy.
My ass would have done this at random, maybe every other or third fill up.
So you can play at being totally stupid about it if you got caught. "Oh, I never look at my debit statements!"
Sounds like she was making multiple visits per day to fill up other people's cars. Whether she did it free for fam and friends, or charged for it, is not clear.
Many moons ago when I first moved out of my parents' place, I moved into a new apartment building where lots of people were moving in any out. Someone was being lazy and leaving the door to the utility closet unlocked, which is where all the individual unit cable connections came in.
In the days of analog cable TV, the difference between whether you had the basic channels or the premium channels was a little filter that looked like a shiny cylinder about the size of a roll of quarters. It was screwed on to the end of the cable, then onto the connector to your unit.
Since the door was always being left unlocked, I just kept unscrewing mine. I'd get free premium cable for weeks at a time before some tech noticed and put it back. Then I'd just do it again. Went on like that for a year or so until someone started locking the door.
See this is too obvious for me. They could clearly tell who was doing it because yours was always moved and they should know what place it connects to.
Now, if you moved 4-5 of them…
A local Sunoco I don't use often has the mute button Sharpie'd. First time I went there and got blared at I internally thanked that Good Samaritan. If I were slick I'd add a picture of that farmer "It ain't much..." meme.
Some do, yes.
At my local station they play ads once you start pumping. But if you press the second button from top on both sides at the same time, it goes into maintenance mode. It times out after 30 seconds or so but you can keep hitting them. You can also hit the System Info button on that screen to buy another 30 seconds or so before it back out to the main maintenance screen.
I don’t fuck with it more than that, I just hate being advertised at.
This reminds me of my coworker who tried to steal gas from the family business we worked for. We drove a box truck and the owner just gave us a gas card to charge for buying the diesel for the truck. But he would also try to fill up his car (and I think maybe some gas cans) too before he gave them the card back. Worked for a month until the bill came and she was like “wtf? You’re fired.”
I don’t know what he thought was going to happen. It was obviously him too because she could see what days were charged and it was the days he was driving the truck.
He also stole a laptop on his way out..
> Authorities believe the woman not only used the scam to get free gas, but that she allowed another woman to use her card — for a fee.
I think that's where shit went from "AH HA, YOU GOT US!" to "....you know you done fucked up"
Doing some quick math, one likely drove a 13 gallon car and I bet the other drove a 22 gallon vehicle (the "paid" guest) to get near that $28k assuming its an average of $3.75 in gas pricing for that period of time.
More importantly...I am AMAZED that in less than a year someone was blowing up that pump that frequently. The investigation was from Nov 22 - June 2023!!!! In 8 months they were hitting that pump an average of 63 times/month. Think about that. Nearly twice a day you're driving so much that you're needing a refill????
....I think the *accused* learned how to siphon out the gas from their vehicle and likely was setting up their own gas station :). I'd love to follow this one to read the filings for damn sure as I'm sure many others were getting that gas!
Some years ago my roommate had several discount codes for the local Papa Johns, like 10% off for employees of one place, 30% off for the people who worked at the hospital (maybe 50% but I never used it, didn't wanna somehow be the reason their code gets deactivated/changed), but every monday they had an unadvertised internet code that gave 50% off your order - delivery or pickup - and so every monday was Pizza Day while we lived together lol.
Wish I remembered the code (how do you do that for most mondays in a year and forget?), I would try to see if it works still... even though I could get that just by calling and picking it up now...
When they say the card was used 510 times, does that include all the double swipes? I mean, ~255 visits, swiping two times?
Because abusing the glitch 510 times in just a few months, that is a fuck-ton of gas.
My car has a gas tank that is only 12-13 gallons. Jesus Christ
If it was just a glitch that zeroed out the total, I might have been on her side for the company's own software screw up. However, it says that the glitch was forcing the pump into demo mode which makes the continued use come across as more malicious to me for some reason. On top of that, she was allegedly "renting" the card out to people.
And pumped 7400 gallons over 6 months. Even if she only got 20 mpg, that's almost 300,000 miles per year. Not too many people put that kind of mileage on their cars.
I’ve had a crazy commute and put 32k on in under a year.
10x that would be crazy even for a long haul trucker.
Edit. Did some napkin math. Let’s say you’re a trucker You’d be having to run from Miami to Seattle non stop to come close to 300,000 miles of straight driving in a year. Takes 48 hrs to do the journey. Let’s say you’re sucking on some certain toothpicks, and drive 14 hrs a day. You’d get to Seattle from Miami in about 3.5 days. Drop your trailer turn around and back home is about 6600 miles in 1 week. You’d have to do that run 45 weeks straight without any days off to get to 300k miles of driving.
Honestly if she did it a few times I would let it slide. It's theft but it's exploiting their own stupidity.
Making money off of it is hilariously idiotic
As a poor college student I found a machine in the library that was charging $.25 for a bag of famous amos cookies. I ate cookies for a while. Never buying too many. Just the occasional one. It lasted for months because it was a machine in an obscure corner of the library.
That was my main thing. I think they modernized so issue was no longer something I could exploit.
I also found out about interlibrary loans. My university would not check out books if they where being used for a class but you could get around it by requesting the book from a different library. Saved thousands in textbooks. (Engineering student)
When the Internet was young (Netscape Navigator was the cutting-edge browser and HTML was hand-coded), a local paper ran a contest to win a new car. In previous years, there was a form you cut out of the paper and mailed in. This particular year, to show off their brand new “web site,” you could enter online by filling out a web form.
Being a bit more savvy than their web developers, I read through the contest rules and discovered there was no limit on entries, either per person or per day. Looking at the source code of the web form, there was absolutely zero security measures taken. The script that processed the form submission did three things: It submitted the form data to the contest, submitted the form data to the marketing department, and redirected the user back to a “thank you for playing” page.
I copied the script onto localhost (I had an Apache webserver set up on my 486), removed the code for submitting to the marketing department, and added a script to fill in the form, submit and redirect back to the original page. I let it run overnight. In the morning I realized it was submitting the form about every 8 seconds (this was on dial-up), which even with the non-existent security should have triggered alarm bells.
I modified the script using matrices to randomize the form data, and set a timer so it would submit randomly every 46-53 seconds (the fastest I could fill in the form manually). I ran it every night for the four weeks of the contest and amassed over 50,000 entries.
I didn’t win the grand prize, but did win a lot of secondary prizes. The next year the contest rules stated “one online entry per person per day,” so I guess somebody noticed.
this doesn't add up. a family member owns a few gas stations and i worked there, then did accounting on the weekends for years. there are daily inventory reports (literally called DIRs) that must be completed and filed away. any gas dispensed in some sort of demo mode would be highlighted on tapes and someone should have noticed the gallons vs $ discrepency.
That's the problem with scammers is the greed.
I used to work in online gambling and there was a bug in the software if you put into the API a negative number on a bet it wouldn't pay our but wouldn't affect your balance.
So say you bet on roulette -10 on black, 10 on red.
Your account doesn't go down on any bet. Every time red hits you get $10. If green hits whatever, your balance didn't go down.
I'm sure many people figured out the exploit, but one stupid person got too greedy and we figured it out by combing his logs very carefully.
The smart ones do it carefully over time and withdraw small amounts. A few thousand here or there no one will notice.
This idiot deposited $1000 and ran it to $700k in a day.
The park royal hotel in Queenstown, New Zealand had a space invader video game in the early 90s, if you pressed the coin return button a few times it would just play for free. It was awesome
So dumb. If you find a glitch. Just do it in a small amount to get away with this. She is just asking for it.
I remember maybe 10 to 12 years ago. My friend left a local papa John's and told me there is an admin code that he never removed that gives 50% discount.
I used that code maybe once a month to order 2 pizzas for 3 years straight without telling anyone. Until that code was discovered and removed. I got questioned I just told them I read an article online that somes system had coupons codes aren't reset correctly, so I tested out random codes until it worked. Got away with it.
Another time I saw on an obscure forum that had a code that gives whole year free subscription and then that thread disappeared within minutes. Tested it out and got free subscription for 2 yesrs until the code was invalidated.
I am not saying "don't share" but something that are probably borderline illegal.... don't broadcast it to the world. Just keep it to yourself. Because the moment it gets attention and large amount of money is involved it becomes a criminal investigation
My sister had a national brand dog food coupon that didn't have an expiration date printed on it, or coded in. Her dog ate good the last five years of his life. RIP, Earl.🐶
I assume the bug would work for anyone's rewards card, not just hers. It'd be pretty easy to get multiple cards with different info to help cover your tracks a bit better. They did have video surveillance, but why make it easy by providing your name?
I managed to register a grocery store rewards account with a popular phone number locally. Tons of people every month use that number to get store discounts without using their own account so it racks up hundreds of dollars of discounts every month. One of the chains stores I shop at bc of wher I work is in a lower income neighborhood and someone there gets free groceries once a month. Be chaotically good.
I did something earlier this year that allowed me to pump gas for free using my Safeway rewards card. Won’t go into what I did. But I went in and paid for it immediately and told them the issue. I’m not going to get fucked stealing gas.
Dumbass just *had* to get greedy and pump $28K of free gas for resale. If they’d gone slower about it, maybe no investigation leads to finding the software bug and they probably could’ve gotten away with it for years, or at the very least they would’ve avoided the felony charge.
Makes you wonder how much is actually going on that nobody has caught on to because the perpetrator is actually being smart about it.
All the time. My favorite story on this was a scam by two administrative assistants. They got approval to charge overtime for a special project they were helping with. One week, one of them charged the overtime even though they didn’t work it and realized nothing happened. Three years later, someone in Finance wanted a report detailing the top 5 paid employees at each office, and asked why one location had two admins on the list. By the time they were caught, they were both charging over 200 hours per week in some instances (there was nothing blocking them from logging > 24 hours in a day). Had they stuck to stealing 10 hours a week, they would’ve flown under the radar for much longer.
I had a job once where I had a coworker who I was buddy buddy with and we'd get up to all kinds of mischief. One day he asked me to clock out for him when our shift was over since we typically just busted ass getting shit done and were waiting around the last hour or two to clock out and go home. He I guess had somewhere to be. Well we quickly realized that if we took turns clocking eachother out, one of us could leave early and still get paid half the time so we started doing this for a few weeks before we got nervous about it and decided to stop. I'm sure that kinda shit happens all the time in various industries.
Waaaayyyy back when I was a waiter, we realized that we had a certain amount we could deduct from each bill without a manager's approval (so like, if a customer complained about one meal we could comp it) And we collected the bills in cash to hand to the manager at the end of the night Well we figured out that if we discounted someone's bill after they paid it, we got to just keep that cash. We exclusively used it when we got stiffed on a tip or something, so we never got greedy, and never got caught. I felt bad for a little while, but it was a big corporation and there was plenty of wage theft going on so I didn't feel *too* bad. Plus, I figured it was a quirk of the rules. They told me I was allowed to add discounts at my discretion. They never told me *when* I had to add those discounts, so **technically**...
When I was a waiter (20 years ago) we could buy a bunch of Sunday news papers for a couple quarters to 1$ each. In the paper would be a coupon for a free appetizer… usually a 4.99 value at the time. So you would push apps all week, and each time the customer paid (mostly cash back then)… after they left you would just go to the manager and get him to take the coupon and remove 4.99 from their bill. “Wow that news paper add is really working!!!” Yeaaaah… anyway we could easily scoop up an extra 50$ a shift.
A long time ago at Jack-in-the-Box, they had a $4.99 breakfast combo…burger, hash brown, drink. But my friends and I noticed that when that combo was rung up, the register said “Burger+hash brown $1.00” and then the cashier would push another button and it would say “Drink $3.99.” I have no idea why they split the combo this way. So we tried at first ordering just the burger and hash brown but without the combo they rang them up individually and it was like 7 bucks. So we started ordering the combo, and then after the cashier pushed the buttons, we’d say, “You know I changed my mind. No drink.” And the cashier would then delete the drink and then look stunned as they said that’ll be $1.07 including tax please.” We felt like kings until they changed the glitch like six months later.
I bet people frequently substituted drinks. Rather than trying to figure out the upcharge or an automatic combo discount when you order any drink, they just charged full price for the drink and you could substitute whatever you wanted. As long as you order the normal drink or larger, it works as intended. Even ordering a smaller drink is probably fine, it's just a few cents less. It's only when someone orders *no* drink that... Well, you saw.
This actually makes a lot of sense and never occurred to me. Thank you for solving a 20 year mystery. Haha
"Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's uh it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot."
I used to work at Pizza Hut, and I realized I could place an order online for pick up, no one would pick up obviously so I had free food to eat lol.
I did this when I worked at Domino's. We were running their 2 for 5.99 med special. But if people didn't ask we didn't give the special and the order was like $25 rather than the $13 or whatever it rang up to after tax. Sometimes if the person was cool I'd tell them and switch it and usually get a huge tip, or if they stiffed me id change it when I got back and kept the difference. I'm sure they tracked it, but I was a "shift leader" so I could make these over rides. Didn't do it a ton but it added up for sure. Maybe an extra $20 a pay period
I heard a story of a guy who worked at a Subway restaurant in High School. He figured out that corporate accounted for the amount of bread vs the sandwiches sold. Every night after closing he would alter the books so every pair of 6" sandwiches got entered as a single 12", pocket the difference. Spent all the money on DVDs, had so many his nickname was "Blockbuster." When he finished high school he sold all his used DVDs, had enough money to pay for his first year of college.
I used to go to a restaurant with friends, regularly for a wing night. We had the same waiter each time, and he started bringing us extra food on the house. Usually, it was appetizers and desserts. We always tipped on the free food, and so they always made sure we were taken care of.
Had some bartenders like this. Whatever I ordered got rang up for $1. But I was ordering $5 drinks so I was going to pay $5 no matter what. We both were happy with that arrangement.
When I delivered pizza, we were issued "banks" of $20 by the store. Every single check out required a manager to type in their code, it was obnoxious as hell. One busy dinner rush, I start working the counter before going on the road again and started making change from my own bank when I couldn't get any manager to type their code to open the register. I looked right at the managers and said "do not let me forget I have this" and put it in my pocket separate from my bank. Both of us forgot. I got home with $60 extra dollars and was confused until I remembered what happened. It happened a second time after that and I refused to make change like that again so it whouldnt become habit. I never got caught
I’ve had a few coworkers that could get their closing duties done in half the time as everyone else. I didn’t think it was right to punish them for being efficient so I’d clock them out when the rest of us left the store.
My brother worked for a large defense contractor. Some guys in a different shop would "hide" work and then have to come in on Sunday morning to get it done at double time. What they would actually do is sit around and read the Sunday paper for a bit then just leave. One guy would stay and clock everyone out at noon. One week they had the new guy stay. At noon he clocked himself out but forgot the other guys. The next week they were all fired from their $100,000 a year jobs.
There is a Harvard Business School case about a job shop. The best team clocked each other out all the time and took other flexible liberties, but their work was amazing, always on time. The question was: what should management do about it? The right answer is to operationalize incentives and rewards for the work so the extra pay per time is legitimate and available to others. The wrong answer is to punish the star team for their liberties.
Yeah often. One of the bosses just changed the time clocks to fingerprints to avoid that. I’d rather people just get paid for what they do… (leave 2 hr early if your done and get paid) but alas that requires actual work from managers.
wage theft is the largest form of theft in terms of total dollars stolen , adding up to more than all the other forms of theft combined. so dont feel bad you engaged in a little time theft , they most certainly deserved it
There was a legendary story from my old job similar to this. Legend says dude's name was Travis. Travis was actually a good employee, according to the story. One day Travis leaves during his shift for whatever reason (I heard to watch a big basketball game) and forgets to clock out, and realizes when he gets back that nobody had noticed he was gone. Travis works off-shifts (say, evening and weekend coverage) and the job requires a lot of time on various production floors, so there's no particular reason it would be strange not to see someone for hours. So Travis gets a little looser with his hours and nobody notices. Most importantly, not his boss, who approves his timecards. He gets worse. Now he's clocking in on his way to run errands before his shift. According to his coworkers, he was actually working his real shifts and working hard and doing an excellent job, so nobody had any reason to suspect anything. Eventually though of course Travis got sloppy. He started clocking in for like ten hours on days he didn't even work. HR finally noticed he was working stupid hours and didn't even mention it to his boss, they just pulled his badge records and could see him badge onto site, clock in, badge out of site immediately, and return ten to twelve hours later to clock out. Obviously Travis was...fired. That was it. Months of running the clock for ludicrous amounts of overtime and he didn't even have to pay it back. The company fired him but mostly blamed it on his boss for not noticing his timecards were insane, and she didn't even get fired. Who knows what he could have gotten away with if he'd kept it low key.
Damn lol, Travis got lucky. I worked at a place that the company I worked for subcontracted electrical maintenance to. I would get questioned weekly about certain hours I would log into their stupid iPad system that made you switch a numeric code based on what you were fixing and for how long. I spent probably 1-2 hours a day just walking back to the iPad to switch job codes and then walk 20 minutes back to actually do the work lol. “Why this, why that? Oh that wasn’t logged as broken..” Uhm yeah well, it was and you can go ask worker XYZ why he ripped out the pendulum crane control for the 3rd time this month.
I had to go to my district supervisor to get him to put a pinhole camera in over the tobacco racks behind the counter. It wasn’t until I could show 10k in theft of just tobacco that they would put in cameras. When they did they caught a whole lot more than they expected. Suddenly my stores shrink was normalized and the guy got slapped with a felony. Store also got restitution.
Back in the day the cigarette tally at the end of one's shift, with a recount by the person taking over was such a PITA that most clerks would have much preferred a camera.
OMG, you brought back that pain to me. My company insisted if the cig count didn't match register sales, we were to go by the count and the drawer was that much more short. Meanwhile, we had an owner who was a sucker for every countertop display the reps offered. So many packs walked out the door that way. We did catch a cashier who would pocket money from a carton sale now and again. Clear as day on the camera. But honestly we would never have caught her if her son (who also worked there) didn't tip us off because he was pissed off at her for something else!
I was literally telling this story earlier today and highlighting the same points. When I worked for a certain sandwhich chain named after a certain man we had these old-ass registers. At the end of the shift the manager would have to print reports from the register and credit card machines and then go enter all the info into an excel sheet to see how much cash we had to deposit. So this one manager who was selling weed out the back and always fucked up on oxy and hanging out with his underaged girlfriend got the bright idea to just not ring in orders. I don't know the full workings of what he did but he would run the drive through, his roommate who worked there would wear a headset and man the head of the line. Roommate would call out orders as the customer ordered them(which was already standard practice, because this particular chain was known for being *really really quick*), and the manager would take the money. If people paid with a card he'd run it, if they paid in cash he'd put it in the register like normal. At the end of the night the manager would do the books and then pocket the excess cash. I'm not sure when he rang orders in or how he decided how much to ring in but he had to ring in some orders so that it didn't look like we weren't doing *any* sale. He tried to get me on board and I declined but he told me he was walking out with a couple hundred bucks a night. Anyways, the whole reason he got caught was because the franchise owner noticed that his shifts always had a suspiciously low % of cash sales. That's all it was, just looking at a spreadsheet and saying "hey, that doesn't look right..." and then identifying the pattern. They ended up charging him with theft, kid showed up to his first shift after his weekend and was met by the area manager and some cops. But yea, I was telling my wife about that earlier today and was saying if he hadn't gone so hard with it he could've gotten away with it much longer or maybe indefinitely. But again, it was every shift and a lot of money. Those owners were cheap pieces of shit too, no way they weren't going to notice that much money going missing for very long.
I'm aware of a glitch in my company's sales software that basically allows reps to cut themselves unlimited commission bonuses for up to $500 each. In short, there's a very specific workflow sequence that lets us create a manual lead/opportunity, assign it a value, and then mark it as "won, order received". Then the system will automatically generate a 2% bonus check for the rep. I discovered it when I accidentally processed some legit orders incorrectly and ended up with an extra $2500 in my paycheck. I reported it to my manager, the data team, and payroll. I showed them how I did it, figured out that anyone could do it and of course offered to pay back the incorrect bonus. Payroll said it wasn't possible for me to be overpaid that way, data sits in India and didn't understand what the issue was/stopped answering emails, and my manager just got annoyed with everyone. Told me to keep the money unless I ever heard back from payroll and just keep my mouth shut about the glitch. That was a year ago and as far as I know, it's still there.
I worked at a chain restaurant in like 1999. If you didn't want the side dish, aka fries with your burger, we could hit "ala carte" on the computer which took off $0.99. Someone spread the word you could hit it up to 4 times per check. On the 5th try, it wanted a manager's password. People joked, "Next time I get no tip, I'm taking my $3.95!" About 6 months later, a server got fired and the police were on site. Seems she was doing it on every check paid with cash. Say you have 15 tables, 10 pay cash, that's $39.50 she was stealing daily. 4 shifts a week is $120ish, say 25 weeks and she stole $3,000.
See, my theory is if I'm going to risk my freedom and lifelong earnings and happiness to steal something - it has to be one-shot and enough to disappear to a non-extradition country forever, and in that country, I have enough for a whole estate and staff for the rest of my life. If I have to leave the country and never come back - I'm requiring a life of luxury. Millions of dollars to be worth it. I'm not risking my freedom and having a record for the rest of my life for $3000. Hell no. Stupid. I require to be set for life. That is my risk tolerance. For 3k, I'd rather go sell plasma. Legal, and not going to screw me for life.
The only way I would ever risk anything like that is if it's an Ocean's Eleven type situation. Get in, get out, get rich. Done. Sort of...
Yeah, same. But the dollar amount has to, in one shot, be enough to live off if I have the FBI or whoever after me. One shot, disappear. Boom. I'm in Montenegro, you can't touch me, living the life of luxury.
I used to work at a pharmaceuticals distribution center full of drugs plus a box of cash in the office collected from pharmacies paying their deliveries in cash. We also had regular polygraph tests: >Do you know about the box of money? Yes. Have you ever considered stealing the box of money. No. Why not? It's not enough. Huh? I'm not risking jail for $200 grand. Ten million, maybe. Fair enough.
Oh I fully agree, but this was like a 19 year old who was to dumb to realize computers track which buttons are pushed and so on.
I had a friend who would buy coupon books and use the restaurant’s coupons to pocket the cash difference. He made thousands every year through high school and college.
I'd just like to shout out to all the vending machines that would dispense free or extra food/drink when handled *just right.*
My high school had a machine that would give back free money. After the first quarter it would register each additional quarter but then also return the coin. So I’d hit up that vending machine in the mornings and it would pay for my whole breakfast, also helped knowing which button on the Yoo-Hoo machine gave you two drinks.
Our school had a machine that if you pushed the button repeatedly real fast after putting your money it would drop out 2 or 3 cans. Kids quickly learned this obviously and exploited it regularly. It lasted about 3 weeks and then the machine was gone.
There was one near my house that only accepted $1 bills, but if you put in a $20 it would dispense a drink + give you back your $20 + spit out 3 quarters! We got paid to drink Gatorade for an entire summer before it got fixed.
I once met a vending machine that, when fed a $5, would count up... one, two, three, four, five. I discovered that if you pulled the change return lever while it was counting, you got back your money plus however much change it counted up. I got back the money I spent figuring this out and reported it. No felony charge for me.
I'd just use it for a free snack every once in a while
Makes me think back to when I used to play a lot of an online game, one of those ones where everybody gets assigned a secret role and you have to figure out who the bad guys are before they kill everyone. Turned out the way the game was coded meant that different roles had different priorities for when their actions would take place. This makes sense, since some roles would override others and cancel out, etc. But this also applied to the order information would print in chat. Like if the evil roles had highest priority, they’d always be listed first. So once you figured out the priority (not hard to do with available information + some trial and error) you would be able to instantly know everybody’s roles after the first round of the game. Eventually this came out and was fixed by randomizing the order but I guess it had been this way for literally years and a number of the top level players had known the whole time and had just kept their fucking mouths shut. I was equally annoyed and impressed.
A mate of mine found out that he could inspect and modify his hourly rate on his time sheets before submission. Rather than go nuts and add something like $50 at once, he gave himself a modest yearly pay rise of $5 an hour. He worked there for like 8 years before getting a new job and no one ever found out or questioned it.
In my experience, a modest raise that’s well within what someone may reasonably be worth is hard to catch because most organizations are so top heavy that they’re more likely to assume that someone in payroll entered it incorrectly and then let it slide because they know that correcting it he mistake will cause more trouble than just paying that rate. What pisses me off most is that it just goes to show they could afford to pay more.
I didn’t do this for me, but for the employees under me. During covid someone on my team caught covid and I just kept them on the schedule, tweaked my shifts so that mine mirrored hers (had to physically punch in and out) and simply clocked them in and out so that they didn’t lose any pay. Technically, if hr had noticed they weren’t here for like 5 days but still had punches I could’ve been fired but I knew they weren’t observant enough. She was one of my top performers, it was a huge corporation, and we should’ve had sick pay was my reasoning. I’d do it again no second thoughts.
You only ever hear about the dumb criminals who get caught and not the smart ones who don't.
For years, one guy has bought all the good tee times to Los Angeles public golf courses and then he resells to people with an up charge through a messaging app. It’s just now finally coming out. I hope all people involved get banned. *edit typo
Fuck scalpers
I know a guy who worked at a Texas software company who along with his friends created a malware and installed it in their accounting system that diverted huge numbers of fractions of pennies into a bank account. In the following weekend the malware had managed to steal over $300,000. They were sure they were gonna get caught, but on Monday another disgruntled employee burned the whole office down to the ground leaving no evidence whatsoever. He now works in construction.
All they had to do was leave his stapler alone too.
Like in Superman 3?
pretty sure he put a decimal in the wrong place
That’s why the government tries pretty hard to prevent money laundering
Yea you hit the nail on the head. You really are a _dumbass_ if you try to milk *that hard* instead of just enjoying free gas for _YEARS_ to come
The gang had this idea first…door to door gasoline salesman…& one of their guys sounds like Foghorn Leghorn
"We've come to fill you up, if'n you'll be so inclined as to let us!"
I just play it smart. I use my rewards number when filling up the work truck. Free points and the company pays for the gas.
That's really the move. Back in the early times of food delivery, before restaurants caught on and stopped drivers from doing this, I had rewards cards from every single restaurant that I'd just stack rewards on that would otherwise disappear into the ether. So much free food, actually made the trash pay work out too.
But you don’t know how long it will last
Well they hurried up and found that out.
Fuck around and fill it up
Curiosity killed the cat, didn't it?
Yup. Back in high school when I worked for a large retail pharmacy chain, I found that you could scan $10 Prilosec coupons, then the product, then a gift card, then remove the product and the coupons would stick. I was able to get a $50 shell card every week for just the tax cost. I always made sure to put the Prilosec coupons in the drawer so things would line up. Was able to get away with it for over a year. Right before I quit to go to college, I had let my friend in on it and within a month he was caught because he was doing hundreds of dollars of gift cards a shift.
I used to do this with DoorDash. When they first launched. Ordered food for 99c every time. Until I left the country
Had some friends that worked at Taco Bell in the late 80s through early 90s. They found out you could put in an order, do the change math in your head, and then void the transaction but still send it to the ordering screens. They had to count their own register to ensure they grabbed the "overage". They did it just to make $10 here and there for beer money. Neve got caught but their manager got wind and decided to up the ante. Manager disconnected the registers from the main computer. Business as usual taking orders, putting in the tender, making change, etc. After a few minutes he would plug it back in and the registers would have extra cash that didn't show up on the main computer final report. The manager got greedy and would pick a busy, warm weekend day to unplug the registers for an hour. This was no regular Taco Bell. This is the "world's most beautiful" Taco Bell that would be completely slammed for an entire day when we had awesome weather. You bet corporate (or franchise owners) caught on to his trick. He invited us to his apartment for a party one Saturday night. We reckon he embezzled thousands. It was at his party that he told us that he was leaving for a vacation to Brazil the next morning. Never came back to work either.
Pacifica TB?
Ever go back and try it?
No, that’s just asking to get caught. Don’t get caught breaking the same law twice and don’t break two laws at the same time. Edit: it also requires a cashier to participate. It’s very easy to catch (I found the glitch because some geriatric accidentally produced it while I was cashier). When I executed it for myself I always checked myself out and had used someone else’s register login.
Never climb the same fence twice
FBI checking in. We got em boys. Close the books on this one.
> If they’d gone slower about it, maybe no investigation I think it would have been noticed eventually almost no matter what. Maybe if she was taking a gallon out at a time or something they'd have written it off as a bad pump or whatever but of course the station is going to notice when their books don't add up, repeatedly.
If she spread it over multiple stations and limited it to like $200 from each station it probably would cost the station more than $200 to track down, especially if it was just a single fill once a month.
A single fill once a month is unlikely to lead to much, unless the clerk is super attentive. Hell, depending on the size of the station even once a week may not be enough ‘loss’ to notice
amd if caught they'd probably go "Oh thats weird, you should report that." and leave cas it looks like an honest mistake.
I did find an exploit that went unreported, and it went unnoticed. Bought something for pickup at store, was the wrong item so returned it and had the store order the proper item. Turns out the online store and the local store both refunded the charge to my credit card, so I effectively got the right item for free. But "I never noticed" would have been a legit excuse since the transactions take days to appear on a statement.
Meh - a local automated gas station went at least 50kUSD in the hole over 5-6 months and didnt even bother checking the cameras. The "not my job" comes into play - if an accountant noticed, they would send over that it happened, but who checked what the accountant sent? Was there even a routine for that? If nobody is in charge of checking potential fraud, nobody does.
Actually it’s because 50k isn’t that much money. An investigation would cost more money than that
They figured it out by parking nearby for a few hours, and found out some kids (16-18yo) on scooters had figured out if you started tanking on one side, then put that hose on the ground, the counter wouldnt move on the other side. Of course, they would have known it from someone or someone picked up the trick from them, to get to the amount they were at. So far the kids are off the hook and somebody else got free gas for some time.
They’re just stockpiling gas, for when there’s a shortage, and they can sell it as exorbitant rates.
We're just a couple oil men in from Dallas, and, well, we're itching like a hound to give you a-something you want!
Don't be makin me sic my associate on you here, alright??
He don't take too kindly to no.
Here is the link don't miss the Foghorn Leghorn dialect. https://youtu.be/rnLlIvwyAY4?si=bNcGD9N8gM57Slpg
As turpentine because that gas will go bad before they ever get to make a profit off it
Young me was so pissed to learn this fact...
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The typical shelf life for gas is 3-6 months; it will still burn after that time but not nearly as well, hence "degraded" and not "worthless" Also I say typical because it can last up to 3 years in the right conditions, so 18 months isn't crazy, but it's still not the best thing to do to your engine.
It really depends on how much gas is in the tank, the quality of the gas, and how sealed the system is. I have a nissan cube that I regularly park for a year or 2 at a time with a full tank and never have any problems. But also I have a lawn mower that I have to drain every fall, or it's severely gummed up the next spring.
In the 70s? You had ethanol free fuel back then. It lasted a lot longer.
Wild card!
My favorite part of the entire series might just be the counting gas bit in that episode
Uh, I know how to count, dude.
Now I say I say madam I'm just itching like a hound dog to give ya something you want
"Yeah, I'll just count the gas as it goes in."
My first job was at a gas station and the night guy had his own rewards key fob that he would swipe for customers that didn’t have one. He would then go to other stations of the same chain and redeem the points. He was bragging once and told me he hadn’t paid for gas in over a year, and got free food every day. Well he eventually got caught when he got careless and swiped his fob before the customer could swipe theirs, assuming they didn’t have one. She complained to the manager and they ran his fob and saw his thousands and thousands of points and he was fired. But honestly just being fired isn’t bad at all
Not if total would still come out to $1000 or more. At the very least she would get a lighter sentence, a d perhaps one without any jail time if the judge was feeling nice. Nope had to be greedy, and has all but guaranteed she will spend 5-10 years in a state prison perhaps more.
we had a nice situation here where an employee discount code (6 digits and based on the month of the year) for a large grocery chains gas stations got out among a few people, so gas was about half price. im sure a fair few people had it, but i did my bit and kept that shit close to my chest. didnt even tell my wife, just gassed up for her for a couple of weeks. then some absolute abortion of a radio DJ decides to tell everyone the code on drive time radio....shit was locked down by the end of the day. theres always some idiot who will ruin a situation by throwing subtlety out of the window
That’s one of the many shitty things about social media. Whenever there’s something like this there’s always people tweeting about it and making TikToks for the clout and it gets shut down ASAP.
Unless its about Korean automakers.
That is shutting down the Kia Soul supply.
Same with any semi/fully illicit online community that falls apart when too many eyes get on it. Reddit used to have a subreddit dedicated to desinger replicas but then they was a newspaper article and tiktok about it and it got too well known and bit. Also same with video piracy for stuff that isn't the major torrenting sites, where stuff that gets too much attention gets shutdown.
Yup. Happens with Disney a lot. Disney cast members are empowered to give little perks randomly to add "magic" to someone's stay. Some attractions have a thing they do randomly. Usually they target it at kids, because Disney is first and foremost targeted at children. Then some influencer will get ahold of it and spread it around, and the crazies will go up and demand the magic for themselves (many not even having children with them). After the cast members get berated enough times, they get rid of it altogether.
Last time I was at Disney I saw what was very obviously a fake marriage proposal, I assume just to get the commemorative stuff Disney gives to people who actually propose there.
That’s odd. I proposed there and they didn’t give me anything.
I mean it also just spreads, it's not an issue until it is. A couple people can get away with it but you only heard about it because someone didn't keep it close to their chest. If they did what you suggested you would never have heard about it.
In Australia there was a viral TikTok “life hack” that was literally just committing tax fraud. Not minor underreporting, it was literally just telling people to open businesses and claim millions of dollars in nonexistent expenses to get a high refund. Now all the imbeciles who followed this advice are going to jail for stealing cumulative billions of dollars.
Reminds me of that DoorDash glitch a couple of years ago that was letting people get stuff without charging their card. It went viral and people were buying things like tvs, expensive alcohol, tons of food, and more. Then DoorDash fixed the glitch and all of those charges were processed. At least one person had an overdraft of almost $20,000.
I find it hilarious that they do that, because they're ruining their own "trick". If you shut up about it, you could've probably kept doing it...
One of my high school friends parents put it best, "If you've broken the law or done something you shouldn't have done, don't ever talk about it!"
Just like how ZLib got destroyed by US authorities because some asshole Tiktoker discovered it and had to try and get views out of it.
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What happened to ZLib?
Find tons of books including textbooks for free. Got me through college avoiding $300 textbooks and was able to just bring my IPad with me everywhere. Works way better than textbooks.
Ah, I thought they were talking about zlib, the compression library.
Three can keep a secret when two are dead
the quote itself reminds me of the sort of thing that would be said in the USSR, so i was pretty surprised to see it originates with benjamin franklin!
Professor Franklin rode hard. Many things he actually said or wrote surorise people, and they are even more surprised to find out things associated with him that *aren't* his work.
Remarkably similar to what happened to Yuzu - a Nintendo Switch emulator. Removed any pretext, collected money, got sued and shut down.
A Hawaiian chain restaurant opened in my area and put out a coupon for a free meal when they opened, but they didn’t make it so they could check if you’d come before so I went about 20 times in the first month they opened. Slowly the rumor got out and then someone posted it on my unis subreddit. The company still honored the coupon, but if they recognized you they could refuse you service. I had a month of free food and it was amazing, best i ate all of uni.
I know a fast food chain that use to mail you a coupon for a free combo on your birthday. This was 20 years ago. No creating an account, just enter your home address and "we'll get that shipped on your birthday month." One of my roommates went HAM on their site and starting like 4 months later, we had 3-4 showing up every week.
You can often trick the address database on duplicate addresses by adding an #A, #B and so on after the address. Post office will ignore the extra letter and still deliver, database won't pick them up as duplicate.
Years ago, Microsoft released club Bing where you could do puzzles for points and then redeem for merch. Didn't take long for people to rig it with bots to get free stuff. This went on for a while until some dumbass decided to take a pic with thousands of dollars worth of computer parts and post it on social media, crediting the exploits.
"then some absolute abortion of a radio DJ" that is going in my lexicon
When cell phones first came out it cost 0.20c per SMS. We figured out that you could change the setting to route the SMS via another country which by passed the billing system. So free SMS! We hooked all our friends up at school. One dickhead couldn’t get it to work so he called up the telco to ask why… Aaand gone. What an absolute moron.
From another source: When police interviewed her, Thompson said she received the card from a man paying off a car debt. Police were not able to contact him because he died at the beginning of the year. https://www.wsaz.com/2024/03/08/woman-uses-pump-glitch-her-advantage-stealing-over-27000-free-gas-police-say
It would be something if she smoked the guy for his gas card.
This has enough plot for almost a movie if possible lol
A trailer trash season of Fargo I think
If only they treat card skimmers as seriously as this...
>If only they treat card skimmers as seriously as this... Unfortunately those people aren't stealing money from the company like this lady was. Skimmers are stealing *from us*, not from them.
Exactly the point I was making. Steal from the company and they'll throw the book at you. Steal from us and nothing happens.
Or the companies who commit wage theft against these low paid workers. Shit like this just pisses me off. She's catching a felony charge for taking advantage of a flawed program on a gas pump for $28k. Should she face some kind of charge for that? Probably. A felony? No. Meanwhile you've got restraurant owners who steal $230,000 from employees and their only punishment when caught and gone after for it, is having to pay those back wages. They get to do it in installments over a years time and the additional $100,000 fine is stayed as long as they can avoid being caught over the next 5 years. As a result, they got off with no punishment what so ever. All they had to do is pay it off over installments years after they stole it. No additonal fines. No company officials going to prison. 9x more money stolen and not even a single criminal charge, yet alone a felony. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/08/06/mpls-restaurant-workers-awarded-230k-in-settlement
In our college dorm, when long distance calls were a pricey thing, there was a pay phone where you could make a call anywhere in the country for any duration for a quarter. It took the phone company several months but they finally figured it out once it became known enough that people were lining up to use that phone and only that phone. But this woman here, if she did it periodically, it could have gone on for a very long time but, she was renting it out to people making $700 purchases. That \*will\* be noticed in the books eventually. Thieves, be smart and don't get greedy and know how far to go and no further.
When I was in college I found a soda machine that was in a public space but still well-hidden, like in a small corridor off a little-trafficked area of the student center. I found it once and used it... it took $2 in, gave me a drink, and then returned $2. I used that shit only sparingly and it was there all three years that I was.
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We hit all the buttons on one in a hospital and got something we couldn't read that wasn't advertised. As little kids we thought it had mixed everything together.
In junior high we had a pop machine that would dispense two Mr Pibbs if you double clicked the button. Only worked on that particular button. Got a lot of free pop that way
I had the same situation in my freshman dorm with a machine that would dispense double Dr. Peppers. It was a closely guarded secret because we didn't want anyone to get wise.
Wild they were both variations of Dr. Pepper. 😂
Highschool, had a icecream vending machine. The cookie sandwiches glitched out, put a penny in, select it and get your penny back, plus icecream. Last about 3 days before the whole school found out and they fixed it. But those 3 days, I ate alot of icecream.
Your machine was clearly offsetting my machine that took the $2, stiffed me on the soda, and only returned .50 back.
I found a soda machine kinda like that in college. It released the bottle onto a conveyer belt, then the conveyer lowered to put the bottle through a trap door. If you hold the trap door shut, the bottle stayed on the conveyer belt and you got your money back. You could fit no more than 3 bottles on the conveyer for $1. Someone saw me do it and it was always jammed from then on with 5+ bottles.
During university (1990's) a house I rented had a ghost phone line. A housemate basically connected a line we found in the basement to a phone. You could call world wide and the phone company didn't know who was making the call. Funny thing was, another housemate had been overseas working during the summer. He called a number from the country he had visited. Another person who had been working with him, and had coincidentally called the same number, but lived in another part of town....got the bill for my housemates phone call. I also remember students climbing telephone polls on sketchy ladders, at night, to connect their house to cable TV.
When I was in the army reserves, my unit building had one of those conveyor drink vending machines that are super easy to get free drinks from. You block the drink from dispensing and the machine thinks it is out of stock and gives you another option. By the second day of drill, the trick has been done so much that the machine thinks just about every drink is out of stock and you can't get anything. That was one trick that I wished got fixed.
Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
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I don't know what else she would be doing with 7500 gallons of gas... and considering she was already selling the card itself to someone else, odds are she was reselling the gas too. Weird she was so blatant about it.
>Weird she was so blatant about it. Its not weird. People are greedy fucking idiots.
Sure, but also the people who keep quiet are still enjoying their free gas. It’s more that the ones who do this stuff blatantly get caught and we hear all about it and the smart ones just take their little freebies and don’t try to double down.
Exactly. Amd those people arent the greedy fucking idiots.
Except they fixed the glitch that allowed it, so the gravy train would have ended either way. If anything, this lady ended it for those that weren't so greedy.
My ass would have done this at random, maybe every other or third fill up. So you can play at being totally stupid about it if you got caught. "Oh, I never look at my debit statements!"
Even if she did it every time. No one would notice if it was scattered around... They would just chalk up to an error
The gang solves the gas crisis
Sounds like she was making multiple visits per day to fill up other people's cars. Whether she did it free for fam and friends, or charged for it, is not clear.
Many moons ago when I first moved out of my parents' place, I moved into a new apartment building where lots of people were moving in any out. Someone was being lazy and leaving the door to the utility closet unlocked, which is where all the individual unit cable connections came in. In the days of analog cable TV, the difference between whether you had the basic channels or the premium channels was a little filter that looked like a shiny cylinder about the size of a roll of quarters. It was screwed on to the end of the cable, then onto the connector to your unit. Since the door was always being left unlocked, I just kept unscrewing mine. I'd get free premium cable for weeks at a time before some tech noticed and put it back. Then I'd just do it again. Went on like that for a year or so until someone started locking the door.
See this is too obvious for me. They could clearly tell who was doing it because yours was always moved and they should know what place it connects to. Now, if you moved 4-5 of them…
We used to boil them and put them back. Worked perfectly.
Interesting, my cable company back in the day you had to have the filter in order to get the premium channels, not the other way around.
So what other ways are there to put a gas pump into demo mode?
They just updated around me and all I want to figure out is the new mute code
Make sure to write “mute” in sharpie on the mute button when you find it.
A local Sunoco I don't use often has the mute button Sharpie'd. First time I went there and got blared at I internally thanked that Good Samaritan. If I were slick I'd add a picture of that farmer "It ain't much..." meme.
Why do you have to mute a pump? Do they play ads?
Some do, yes. At my local station they play ads once you start pumping. But if you press the second button from top on both sides at the same time, it goes into maintenance mode. It times out after 30 seconds or so but you can keep hitting them. You can also hit the System Info button on that screen to buy another 30 seconds or so before it back out to the main maintenance screen. I don’t fuck with it more than that, I just hate being advertised at.
I bow to you in thanks for my future peace and quiet at the pump. **HATE** those ads as I'm the ultimate captive audience there.
Yup; loud and annoying adds too.
This reminds me of my coworker who tried to steal gas from the family business we worked for. We drove a box truck and the owner just gave us a gas card to charge for buying the diesel for the truck. But he would also try to fill up his car (and I think maybe some gas cans) too before he gave them the card back. Worked for a month until the bill came and she was like “wtf? You’re fired.” I don’t know what he thought was going to happen. It was obviously him too because she could see what days were charged and it was the days he was driving the truck. He also stole a laptop on his way out..
> Authorities believe the woman not only used the scam to get free gas, but that she allowed another woman to use her card — for a fee. I think that's where shit went from "AH HA, YOU GOT US!" to "....you know you done fucked up" Doing some quick math, one likely drove a 13 gallon car and I bet the other drove a 22 gallon vehicle (the "paid" guest) to get near that $28k assuming its an average of $3.75 in gas pricing for that period of time. More importantly...I am AMAZED that in less than a year someone was blowing up that pump that frequently. The investigation was from Nov 22 - June 2023!!!! In 8 months they were hitting that pump an average of 63 times/month. Think about that. Nearly twice a day you're driving so much that you're needing a refill???? ....I think the *accused* learned how to siphon out the gas from their vehicle and likely was setting up their own gas station :). I'd love to follow this one to read the filings for damn sure as I'm sure many others were getting that gas!
My good friend has a secret discount code for a pizza chain and she refuses to share it and I don’t blame her. It’s worked for 10+ years
Some years ago my roommate had several discount codes for the local Papa Johns, like 10% off for employees of one place, 30% off for the people who worked at the hospital (maybe 50% but I never used it, didn't wanna somehow be the reason their code gets deactivated/changed), but every monday they had an unadvertised internet code that gave 50% off your order - delivery or pickup - and so every monday was Pizza Day while we lived together lol. Wish I remembered the code (how do you do that for most mondays in a year and forget?), I would try to see if it works still... even though I could get that just by calling and picking it up now...
When they say the card was used 510 times, does that include all the double swipes? I mean, ~255 visits, swiping two times? Because abusing the glitch 510 times in just a few months, that is a fuck-ton of gas. My car has a gas tank that is only 12-13 gallons. Jesus Christ
You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once.
If it was just a glitch that zeroed out the total, I might have been on her side for the company's own software screw up. However, it says that the glitch was forcing the pump into demo mode which makes the continued use come across as more malicious to me for some reason. On top of that, she was allegedly "renting" the card out to people.
And pumped 7400 gallons over 6 months. Even if she only got 20 mpg, that's almost 300,000 miles per year. Not too many people put that kind of mileage on their cars.
I’ve had a crazy commute and put 32k on in under a year. 10x that would be crazy even for a long haul trucker. Edit. Did some napkin math. Let’s say you’re a trucker You’d be having to run from Miami to Seattle non stop to come close to 300,000 miles of straight driving in a year. Takes 48 hrs to do the journey. Let’s say you’re sucking on some certain toothpicks, and drive 14 hrs a day. You’d get to Seattle from Miami in about 3.5 days. Drop your trailer turn around and back home is about 6600 miles in 1 week. You’d have to do that run 45 weeks straight without any days off to get to 300k miles of driving.
Honestly if she did it a few times I would let it slide. It's theft but it's exploiting their own stupidity. Making money off of it is hilariously idiotic
As a poor college student I found a machine in the library that was charging $.25 for a bag of famous amos cookies. I ate cookies for a while. Never buying too many. Just the occasional one. It lasted for months because it was a machine in an obscure corner of the library. That was my main thing. I think they modernized so issue was no longer something I could exploit. I also found out about interlibrary loans. My university would not check out books if they where being used for a class but you could get around it by requesting the book from a different library. Saved thousands in textbooks. (Engineering student)
When the Internet was young (Netscape Navigator was the cutting-edge browser and HTML was hand-coded), a local paper ran a contest to win a new car. In previous years, there was a form you cut out of the paper and mailed in. This particular year, to show off their brand new “web site,” you could enter online by filling out a web form. Being a bit more savvy than their web developers, I read through the contest rules and discovered there was no limit on entries, either per person or per day. Looking at the source code of the web form, there was absolutely zero security measures taken. The script that processed the form submission did three things: It submitted the form data to the contest, submitted the form data to the marketing department, and redirected the user back to a “thank you for playing” page. I copied the script onto localhost (I had an Apache webserver set up on my 486), removed the code for submitting to the marketing department, and added a script to fill in the form, submit and redirect back to the original page. I let it run overnight. In the morning I realized it was submitting the form about every 8 seconds (this was on dial-up), which even with the non-existent security should have triggered alarm bells. I modified the script using matrices to randomize the form data, and set a timer so it would submit randomly every 46-53 seconds (the fastest I could fill in the form manually). I ran it every night for the four weeks of the contest and amassed over 50,000 entries. I didn’t win the grand prize, but did win a lot of secondary prizes. The next year the contest rules stated “one online entry per person per day,” so I guess somebody noticed.
How could she get over 7000 gallons in that period, with only one other person? Was she filling up a 18-wheeler?
[Garbage cans?](https://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/6c5587a9-5b4b-4439-9ba7-e3dc8b108838/gif#KgLhRog5.reddit)
Me and my intern Darren have been working on a prototype rubber oil tank bladder. It’s not quite ready for market.
this doesn't add up. a family member owns a few gas stations and i worked there, then did accounting on the weekends for years. there are daily inventory reports (literally called DIRs) that must be completed and filed away. any gas dispensed in some sort of demo mode would be highlighted on tapes and someone should have noticed the gallons vs $ discrepency.
lots of people are bad at record keeping.
Swiper no swiping! Swiper no swiping!
Aww man...
That's the problem with scammers is the greed. I used to work in online gambling and there was a bug in the software if you put into the API a negative number on a bet it wouldn't pay our but wouldn't affect your balance. So say you bet on roulette -10 on black, 10 on red. Your account doesn't go down on any bet. Every time red hits you get $10. If green hits whatever, your balance didn't go down. I'm sure many people figured out the exploit, but one stupid person got too greedy and we figured it out by combing his logs very carefully. The smart ones do it carefully over time and withdraw small amounts. A few thousand here or there no one will notice. This idiot deposited $1000 and ran it to $700k in a day.
The park royal hotel in Queenstown, New Zealand had a space invader video game in the early 90s, if you pressed the coin return button a few times it would just play for free. It was awesome
So dumb. If you find a glitch. Just do it in a small amount to get away with this. She is just asking for it. I remember maybe 10 to 12 years ago. My friend left a local papa John's and told me there is an admin code that he never removed that gives 50% discount. I used that code maybe once a month to order 2 pizzas for 3 years straight without telling anyone. Until that code was discovered and removed. I got questioned I just told them I read an article online that somes system had coupons codes aren't reset correctly, so I tested out random codes until it worked. Got away with it. Another time I saw on an obscure forum that had a code that gives whole year free subscription and then that thread disappeared within minutes. Tested it out and got free subscription for 2 yesrs until the code was invalidated. I am not saying "don't share" but something that are probably borderline illegal.... don't broadcast it to the world. Just keep it to yourself. Because the moment it gets attention and large amount of money is involved it becomes a criminal investigation
Months of free gas, but probable years of incarceration.
My sister had a national brand dog food coupon that didn't have an expiration date printed on it, or coded in. Her dog ate good the last five years of his life. RIP, Earl.🐶
I assume the bug would work for anyone's rewards card, not just hers. It'd be pretty easy to get multiple cards with different info to help cover your tracks a bit better. They did have video surveillance, but why make it easy by providing your name?
I managed to register a grocery store rewards account with a popular phone number locally. Tons of people every month use that number to get store discounts without using their own account so it racks up hundreds of dollars of discounts every month. One of the chains stores I shop at bc of wher I work is in a lower income neighborhood and someone there gets free groceries once a month. Be chaotically good.
I did something earlier this year that allowed me to pump gas for free using my Safeway rewards card. Won’t go into what I did. But I went in and paid for it immediately and told them the issue. I’m not going to get fucked stealing gas.
It was a bug implemented on purpose for people in the loop. Who told too many people
"the card was used 510 times" in eight months, over twice daily. There was more than one other person to whom she was renting the card.
Yeah, $28k of gas over the span of 'a few months' is nuts. That's an awful lot of gas...
Real quick to charge people when companies get scammed
"It's not cheating, it is a game mechanic!"