Thanks to a Fatwallet thread, we stumbled upon a couple of interesting discussions on quora.com. The two threads we want to bring to your attention are “When have you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage?” and “What are the best examples of people cheating the system?” Without further ado, here are the stories we enjoyed the most:
Tiny Transactions Down Under
National Australia Bank(NAB) runs a promotion on their credit cards so that every transaction made is granted 100 QantasFrequent Flyers points.One enterprising NAB customer quickly sees the flaw in the system and asks for advice on the Australian bargain hunting site OzBargain:
“I’m after really cheap digital or physical items or digital donations/tip jars that are worth 1c or 2c each. I need to do many hundreds of transactions on my credit card”
The customer is Anthony Agius, who goes by the user name “decryption”, and it turns out he is also a pretty decent guy. He realises there will be a minimum charge to whoever accepts his micro payments:
“Yeah, charities or not-for-profits doing good work, I don’t want to rip off. If they’re some evil climate change denying, anti-gay, anti-vaccination group though…”
So who does he take on? Decryption decides he probably wont lose any sleep over a toll-road company getting a few extra transaction charges, choosing CityLink who control road toll systems in Melbourne , Victoria, Australia. Decryption then proceeds to make in the order of 7000 or so transactions on his credit card. To put that in perspective that is 74 printed pages worth of credit card statement.End story? Decryption gets over 1,000,000 Qantas Frequent Flyer points before the bank catches on and suspends him from earning further points.
“Free” Parking
When I was in business school at UCLA in the late 80s, parking on campus was very difficult to find (it probably still is), and the surrounding neighborhoods would keep students from parking on the street by requiring a window sticker for all cars, only given out to residents of the neighborhood. If you don’t know, UCLA is right on the edge of Bel Air, a very upscale area with multi-million dollar homes.
A fellow student perpetrated this scam to be able to park: He owned a pickup truck that he drove to school in. In the back of the truck he put a lawnmower, a bag of manure, a hose, and some other gardening utensils. He’d park the car on the streets of Bel Air, drop the back of the truck and pull the gardening gear out a bit as if the truck belonged to a gardener working somewhere in the neighborhood. Then he’d walk over to campus.
It took a full 6 months before he got his first parking ticket.
The Third Grade Loan Shark
I bought my first bike myself by loan sharking in 3rd grade. My parents would give me $5 a day for lunch and snacks in the cafetaria. I would only spend $3.50 per day, and then I would loan out the rest of the $1.50 to other classmates, but I would charge them $.25 cents interest per day. When people didn’t pay up, I told the school bully I would split the amount they owed if he could get them to pay up. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was a loan shark and the bully was my “hired muscle.” I ended up making $95 (profit, not counting my original $1.50 per day “capital investment”) that year, and I bought the coolest bike on the block. I tried to do it again the following year, but I got in trouble with the principal when my “hired muscle” punched a kid in the face. It took many minutes of explaining and negotiating with the principal about why this was not a good practice.
Voltaire Was Ahead of His Time
In 1728 the city of Paris defaulted on a large number of municipal bonds. As a way to offer some restitution, the city decided to sponsor a series of lotteries among the disappointed bondholders. There would be only a few winners, but each investor could at least hope to recoup some of his lost money.
That’s very noble, but the city fathers had overlooked two things. First, because the government had sweetened the pot, the value of the lottery prize vastly exceeded the combined cost of the tickets. And second, among the bondholders were Voltaire and Charles Marie de La Condamine, who realized this.
The two organized a syndicate to buy up all of their fellow bondholders’ tickets, essentially guaranteeing themselves a huge profit each month. They did this systematically for half a year before the government caught on; when confronted, they pointed out that they were doing nothing illegal. In all, the syndicate realized 6 to 7 million francs, of which Voltaire kept half a million — enough to leave him independently wealthy for the rest of his life.
Big Buck, No Whammys, and… STOP!
DamnInteresting.com has a great profile on Michael Larson who gamed the 70’s game show Press Your Luck. Basically, the game show had a digital roulette-type device where you could lose all your money or receive winnings on each “spin”. But, as Larson keenly discovered, it only had a few simply, repeating sequences so once you knew which sequence it was on (based on the square it conspicuously started on), the sequence and timing was fixed so you could–with practice i.e. tapes of the show and a mechanical buzzer–learn to always land on the square to earn more money and always avoid the squares where you lose all your money (with what seemed like amazing luck).
He shattered all the records for winnings on any game show at the time (which held until Ken Jennings incredible Jeopardy streak 30 years later). The producers knew something was up (the odds of that streak naturally were mind-boggling) and delayed giving him his winnings for quite some time but eventually relented since he had done nothing wrong technically. The game immediately changed to avoid such situations.
Gotta be In It to Win It
In 1997, Congress needed extra money for the budget so they auctioned off additional wireless licenses through the FCC. Unfortunately, the geniuses in Congress who ran the auction did not set a minimum bid per license and McLeod USA bid $1 on each license that was up for auction. As the only bidder on 4 licenses, the company was able to win the right to service most of Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Minnesota for all of $4… previous auctions had brought in ~$5.4M/license.
About Those Health Rankings in U.S. News…
I was hired to consult for a hospital that wanted to improve their quality rankings. I figured out that the most important factor in how publications (US News, Healthgrades, etc) rank hospitals (for most specialties) is “in-hospital mortality rate.” My recommendation (among several others that actually impacting patient care) was to de-license several beds from my clients hospitals and rent them out to a 3rd party hospice provider. When a patient was no longer able to be saved (or desired not to be), the patient would move to the 3rd party hospice provider on the hospital, and die a peaceful death there. This turned out to be extremely effective in reducing their mortality rate, as you might expect. The hospital was ranked for the first time as a top 100 hospital in one major publication the following year and was the “most improved hospital in the nation” in a major publication the year after that. (Note: this sounds morbid, but the reality is everyone is gaming the rankings. I just found a better way to do it).
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