A Nebraska woman allegedly found a lucrative quirk at a gas station pump — double-swipe the rewards card and get free gas!
Unfortunately for her, you can’t do that, prosecutors said. The 45-year-old woman was arrested March 6 and faces felony theft charges accusing her of a crime that cost the gas station nearly $28,000.
Prosecutors say the woman exploited the system over a period of several months. Police learned of the problem in October when the loss-prevention manager at Bosselman Enterprises reported that the company’s Pump & Pantry in Lincoln had been scammed.
Receiving free gas is a function of the gas card. Responsibility lies with the company and team who designed the card, not with the woman who used the card as designed.
I totally agree and share this sentiment among MMOs.
If you design your game or product like shit and there are exploits, it’s YOUR FAULT for designing it with exploits, not the customer’s fault for actually using them.
If they don’t like it, then they can do better.
Please put me on this jury. Fastest not-guilty verdict ever.
It’s not a gas card though, it’s a reward card.
Those are designed to give back at most some small % of your purchase if you use enough money.
If a security van crashed in front of you and spilled out gold, would you be allowed to take it because “it’s their responsibility to not crash”?
I’m all for fucking corporations, but your rhetoric seems flawed.
Bad analogy, on multiple fronts. Better:
A truck is on its way to deliver gold to you (you have been told this is happening). When it gets to you, the driver hands you a gold bar. You say, “Thanks! Can I have another?” The driver hands you a second bar. Then you are charged with theft of the second bar, presumably because it was illegal to ask for it.
Right, I just had this happen with a stove. I ordered one, guy came to deliver it, then said we have another in your name, do you want it? LoL
“I mean sure, why not, I’ll take it”
FBI chopper rips into view with multiple black unmarked SUVs following suite, surrounding you. FBI raid team begins to zip line down from the chopper. Guy takes his “J&J delivery” nylon jacket off only to reveal a nylon FBI jacket underneath.
“Nice try, punk”
Not the same, because there’s a person who’s supposed to say “no”.
Yes, the computer is also supposed to say “no”, but surprisingly, laws don’t regard computers and people as being inherently the same thing when it comes to criminal liability.
More like you pay someone for gold. While delivering the gold to you, the gold delivery vehicle falls over and spills all the gold on the ground. Is it now yours?
Property laws exist for a reason. There’s even intangible property, like intellectual property. Although most IP laws are complete and utter bullshit, since they haven’t been around for nearly as long and have been lobbied to be whatever grotesque things they currently are.
And that wouldn’t necessarily be theft in your example, more like slight fraud, insofar that you’re basically convincing the driver (the automated computer in the real life example, which is why people and computer aren’t comparable, and now we have to consider this person to be some sort of mindless drone for the purposes of this hypothetical) that you are due two gold bars, even when you know it’s fraudulent and you’re only supposed to get one.
Because we all know the rewards system isn’t supposed to give out free gas. If you’re a person who’s cognitively capable of understanding what a rewards system is, you’re capable of understanding that.
What a reasonable person might do in that case is perhaps get gas free a few times, but there’s no way of arguing that a reasonable person took 28 000 dollars worth of gas without realising he was doing a serious crime.
Seems to me like the reward was free gas.
If you’ve developed your system that the rewards card can provide a bypass to free fuel, your system is the flawed one and it isn’t on the customer to provide feedback. This isn’t a user testing scenario, they should have solved this bug before it went to production.
People aren’t responsible for cheaply built solutions.
Why would any company design such an easy hack to give out free gas? It’s obviously a malfunction, which happen all the time.
Hell, even game developers rarely leave in consoles for cheat commands anymore in videogames, and giving those out don’t actually bankrupt the company they’re making the game for.
It’s not the customer’s responsibility to try to figure out why and make some determination if the too good to be true deal is real. If it gave it out for a penny, is that too much of a deal? What about half price? 1 penny discount? Where’s the line?
Regardless, I could see someone designing it as a feature because “nobody would ever swipe their card twice normally”.
I hope you don’t think that’s a new observation by any means. If you’re genuinely interested, why not look it up?
First off, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
Secondly, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_the_Clapham_omnibus
The more general concept (the one in use in the US, for instance) is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
I’d like to see a lawyer who would argue that “any reasonable person living and functioning in society could conceivable construe that them taking 28 000 dollars worth of gas was definitely the system working as designed, and they were at no point aware that they were doing anything illlegal.”
Ugh, really? In software development, or in developing anything that involves an end-user, such things are taken into consideration. Especially when there’s payment cards involved.
Quote by a forest ranger at Yosemite National Park on why it is hard to design the perfect garbage bin to keep bears from breaking into it: “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
Most gas cards are designed to give out small rewards, this particular gas card was designed to give out bigger rewards.
If an ice cream scooper mistakenly gives one person a larger scoop than anyone else, I don’t blame the person with more ice cream, that’s obviously the responsibility of the ice cream scooper.
Designing a rewards card that functions correctly and a car crashing because presumably something has gone wrong are very different situations.
A deer didn’t kick the fuel pump, wires weren’t damaged in the register; everything worked as it was designed to, including the double swipe resulting in free gas.
That’s not how the rewards work though.
There’s basically an account to which you accumulate your entire spendings, and based off that, you’ll get a a few % off at most, in form of either a flat out discount or perhaps in some other form.
“Designing IT systems that function perfectly” is what you meant to say with “designing a rewards card that functions correctly”. Do you have any idea of how many technologies and codes and databases are interacting with such a “simple” thing as showing your rewards card to a reader? I’m guessing not.
“Everything worked as it was designed to”
So you think someone designed a system to give out free gas? What a great business model. Perfect design, isn’t it?
Sorry, but if they didn’t test their hardware against swiping twice, that’s 100% on them. Obviously you can’t catch every bug but that doesn’t make it not your fault when something slips through. A responsible company doesn’t blame the user, it fixes the problem and then figures out how to improve development and QA practices so it doesn’t happen again.
It’s not the user’s job to QA your product. If the product allows them to do something without tampering with it, that might as well be its design.
As always, it depends on what the courts say.
That said, yeah it kind of is on them not to crash. If I was on that jury, I would vote ‘not-guilty’ to anyone who picked up money that was laying around on the ground, especially if it’s public property.
My mom once paid a painter hundreds of dollars in cash, and he lost most of it when pulling his hand out of his pocket and the money blew away. Anyone who finds that money should get to keep it.
A man was acquitted in the US for killing his wife during Prohibition after he got out of jail and found out she sold all his stuff. He literally admitted to doing it and the jury said “not guilty” and cheered when the verdict was read.
The court decide what laws are to be enforced, the laws being decided by the legislative part of the government, which is formed of the people, who are you.
So indirectly, our subjective morality decides what the courts say, indirectly. I’m asking what your innate sense would tell you to do in that hypothetical?
Well, in transactional situations that would be pretty subjective. Who fudged it? Subjective. Depending on the sum, there could definitely be an argument.
And what if it was like an open check (btw checks are not a thing everywhere, I’ve seen maybe a dozen in my life and I’m 34, they’re so insecure we don’t use them) for a million dollars? With the value, it would definitely be different.
I think there are laws about lottery coupons as well. Different ones for different places in the world, but still.
Some of those laws say for instance you have to return it, but also that returning something very valuable gives you the right to a finder’s fee.
So “finder’s keeper’s” isn’t quite as simple as we’d like to.
In this specific instance, I really don’t mind someone having abused the system, but technically it would be at least a bit of fraud here. Tanking up once or twice for free would be an understandable happy accident, draining 28k worth of gas is clearly malicious and organised theft.
I don’t mind the occasional theft from corporations, but 28k is a bit beyond the normal robin hooding. Corporations suck currently but we can’t replace a thieving system with a system with even more thieving.
Casual thieving fine, but this is rather organised
It’s going to come down to, was there reason to suspect the machine was a bug?
I assume she swiped rewards, and the. Swiped rewards again when it was asking for a credit/debit card; in which case it’d be the card equivalent of trying to pay with Monopoly money.
If you used a glitch to get a high score in a video game, should the developers be allowed to call the police on you?
Are you stealing someone’s property?
No. You’re playing a videogame.
If they accidentally left a hole in their code that allowed you an infinite money glitch in a large MMO, you probably wouldn’t be sued, as you’ve rather generated money than stolen it, despite it having real world value. However if you systematically abuse a gold thing, even making bots to do it for you, on a large scale, then it could be seen as criminal. (I believe Runescape has had cases like that.)
If they left a glitch in their system that allowed you access to their main server and you managed to easily get access to the whole company’s finances, should they be allowed to call the cops on you?
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