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.
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.”
“I thought I’d won some kind of free gas contest, why else would my card give free gas?”
People can honestly be idiots as you pointed out.
The business holds all the cards when it comes to asking for and accepting payment. If they failed to do that in the way they wanted, it’s on them.
Thanks for the good laugh, this indicates way more faith in business side middle managers than is due. They ask for dumb shit all the time and make the devs do it. While I can’t rule out it being some kind of coding defect, because those also happen all the time, there’s definitely a non-zero probability that someone asked for it to work this way because it was convenient to operate or cheap to implement. Companies involved in payment processing are far from infallible, they just eat their mistakes and make the customer whole most of the time. I’ve worked at 2 different large banks, shit is held together with duct tape, prayers and throwing money at it some of the time.
People are idiots.
For instance, if they don’t understand law and refuse to look it up, they might still argue something ridiculous that’s closer to how primary schoolers think law works.
“I thought I won a contest so I drained 28 000 dollars worth of gas”
You can say that in court, but it’s not true and no-one would believe it. One, maaybe two times of tanking for free you could still do with that excuse and maybe get away with it.
28 000 dollars worth?
Nope.
You might have developed something, but you’ve clearly never worked with developing/coding actual payment systems. To even suggest someone would even think about putting in a “hack” like that is, no offense, quite silly indeed. And definitely criminal.
Fuck ups happen all the time. But no-one puts in a designed function which gives out gas. That’s laughable. Ridiculous. Childish.