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USA Today has a story about a New Jersey couple who allegedly used a glitch in Lowes website to steal merchandise.
A New Jersey couple used a website glitch to try and get more than $258,000 worth of goods — everything from a gazebo to an air conditioner to a stainless steel grill — for free from a home improvement store, authorities said.
Ultimately, the couple was only able to secure nearly $13,000 worth of merchandise from Lowe's after exploiting "weaknesses" in the company's website to have the items shipped to their home in Brick for free, according to a release from the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office.
Romela Velazquez, 24, was arrested and charged with theft by deception and computer criminal activity for accessing a computer system with the purpose to defraud. She attempted to get about $258,068 worth of unpaid merchandise from Lowe's, according to the release.
She actually received about $12,971 in stolen products, according to the release.
Her husband, Kimy Velazquez, 40, was charged with third-degree receipt of stolen property and fencing for his role in the alleged scheme.
The couple tried to sell some of the products on a local Facebook "buy and sell" group for half of the original sale price, listing the products as "new in box," authorities said.
According to an article on NJ.com, an attorney for the couple has stated that Velazquez is just an expert shopper, not a criminal hacker.
Jef Henninger, an attorney for Romela Velazquez, said his client is "the farthest thing from a computer hacker."
"Like many young mothers, she needs to stretch every dollar she can," Henninger said in a statement. "As a result, she has learned to spot good deals. These are the same deals that any of us can take advantage of, but most of us are too busy to learn how to spot them.
"Buying things at a big discount and selling them is not illegal. As a result, she maintains her innocence (and) looks forward to her day in court."
As far as I have been able to find, no technical details about the hack have been released.
One of the more interesting details that I did see was
Lowe's, makers of Ugg shoes and Victoria's Secret have been identified as victims so far – but many more retailers were also ripped off and will eventually be identified, officials said.
Who knew?
Additional coverage at the New York Post and BleepingComputer.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday August 22 2017, @06:54PM (2 children)
Because they agreed to the transaction and because they've empowered that software to make decisions on the company's behalf. If they're afraid of bugs in their site shipping things out for free, they can always code additional layers of validation before the item ships. They can pay a room full of humans to validate every single transaction if that's what it takes. But once they take your money and ship the merchandise, they've agreed to the sale.
If you go into a store and the cashier charges you the wrong price, the store can't arrest you just because their employee screwed up. It's their job to ensure their employees know how to do their job. If they want to use automation to replace those cashiers -- whether it's in store or online -- then that automation ought to be held to the same standard. It's not my job to know the difference between a good deal and a faulty algorithm. It's often not even possible. I can buy a pair of sunglasses for one cent on Amazon while WalMart would charge twenty bucks for an identical pair (identical as far as I can tell from an online photo at least). Seems like a mistake. But they've been on sale at that price for years, people are buying and reviewing them, nobody has removed the listing...so it's probably not a mistake, it's probably cheap Chinese garbage and they're siphoning a profit off the shipping fees or bundled ads or something. So what you're saying is the company can ship those out for years, and then when they start going bankrupt they just threaten to arrest everyone who ever bought a pair unless they pay an additional $20? That's not retail, it's extortion.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 23 2017, @01:29AM (1 child)
They can, if you do it often enough that you get $250k of merchandise that way. This goes way beyond exploiting a single mistake. It's stealing the store blind.
And since we're putting arbitrary words in each others' mouth, what are you really saying? "khallow is quite right and I beg his mercy for having the foolish temerity to question anything he has ever posted." I think it is quite possible that that wasn't what you were saying just like your straw man wasn't what I was saying. A single exploiter who steals a lot of merchandise is not equivalent to selling items to a zillion people at a discount and then attempting to extort considerably more money from them in some ludicrous scheme.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 23 2017, @11:37AM
So if instead of one pair of those cheap sunglasses I buy twenty thousand and start selling them for a profit, THEN I may or may not be a criminal depending on whether or not the company later decides that their pricing algorithm was incorrect?