Every now and then a points & miles blogger puts out a post on deal-chasing ethics, which is a good thing. Case in point:
BOSTON — A couple from Georgia is facing charges in connection with a scheme to defraud Framingham, Massachusetts-based Staples, Inc. of more than $1.4 million.
Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz says 46-year-old John Douglas is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud. His wife, 41-year-old Analyn Douglass, is charged with conspiracy to ship stolen goods in interstate commerce. It’s unclear whether they have lawyers.
Investigators say Douglas and a co-conspirator created more than 1,100 Staples rewards accounts, often using fictitious information. Douglas used a computer script to query a Staples website and seek unclaimed customer loyalty rewards for purchases he didn’t make.
Investigators say they used the rewards to buy merchandise at Staples retail locations throughout United States and that Analyn Douglass sold much of the merchandise on eBay.
Looking at this now, I wonder if it’s this guy. The full story is at the link and it’s long enough that I don’t want to repost the whole thing, but check this out:
In my free time over the next several weeks, I did what I could to decipher the intricacies of the ink rewards program, from an internal systems level. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the online reward program sign-up form required absolutely no verification of account information, including email addresses. This was key.
One Craigslist post and a $200 money order later, I was in possession of a custom Ruby script capable of creating dozens of fake customer reward accounts each minute, outputting the account login information to a spreadsheet (required for printing the rewards cards and store credit codes).
The next week, I was on the phone with a semi-truck driver telling me to meet him at the loading dock behind a Walmart. For $1,000 including freight shipping, I had became the owner of 10,000 used ink cartridges. Eighteen soggy, ink-stained boxes weighing over 50lbs each, taking multiple trips to load into a borrowed full-size SUV.
The result:
I couldn’t give an exact amount how much I made overall, but I was able to pay off my student loans and live very comfortably for a couple years afterwards. Everyone close to me still thinks I’m insane for pulling it all off as long as I did without any real repercussions. I’ve done even worse since, but that’s another story I’ll never tell. I’m incredibly lucky that I’ve never gotten into any legal trouble.
What do you think: same guy, or have a lot of people done this? And is he guilty or innocent?
Most likely, not the same guy.
“As a broke college student, I would frequent shopping deal forums looking for ways to save money.”
“Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz says 46-year-old John Douglas is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud.”
When he is caught, he is guilty; otherwise, ……
These are different causes of action. In the Reddit case, that’s a person circumventing the one account per person rule, but he presumably legitimately returned ink cartridges for $2 a pop. I’ve purchased used ink cartridges to recycle in the past as well, although I never had the inclination to circumvent the 20 per month limit because I don’t do resale. In the federal case, someone is stealing other people’s rewards checks. This is similar to when ccccpn on SlickDeals was still around selling dubious Staples coupon codes, and later people’s rewards checks.
Does Boarding Area have no standards of click bait control anymore? Every blogger posts misleading tiles. Clearly they didn’t get arrested for earning too many rewards, but for the fraud committed.
I meant saverocity….seems like everyone doing clickbait, from lucky to small bloggers.
There is no one filtering out this clickbait garbage. I am totally with you on it. Some of it is so dang blatant and really is a major turn-off. Hurts the product overall.
Clearly not the same person, but that reddit thread was very interesting. Here”s a quote from later in the thread that might be related to this incident:
“Coincidentally, and completely unrelated to my operation, there was a group of hackers around the same time who had deciphered the algorithm the rewards program used to generate store credit codes of a particular amount. I’d see users on the shopping forums complaining about their legitimately-earned store credit showing up as being redeemed, as well as people buying codes that ended up being used.”
The Reddit post says that the office supply store changed their policy after they caught him. Specifically, the store now required customers to make $20 in purchases every month in order to be eligible for ink recycling.
He was clearly talking about Office Depot, not Staples.
Office Depot had purchase requirements for their ink program back in 2010. It’s a dollar-for-dollar style. If you recycled $5400 in a year, then you need $5400 receipts for that year.
Yeah, I agree with other posters that it’s not the same as the reddit guy.
Love you guys but have to agree with the other commenters that this is a misleading, clickbait title that doesn’t match the case. The couple opened up tons of fake accounts, they didn’t “earn” any of those rewards.