Savings which are too good to be true
A student from Texas is accused of posting fake discount coupons to websites. Some think this makes him a latter day Robin Hood. Others point out that this is just one step removed from printing fake money.
Money-Off vouchers have always been a popular and effective promotional tool, especially in grocery retail, and especially in the USA. Brand owners frequently put the coupons on their websites and invite customers to print them off on their own printers. If people repost those coupons to other websites then so much the better and there are coupon websites dedicated to finding and distributing these money-off vouchers. There is no problem with that. The more people who find out about the coupon and try out the product, the happier the brand owner will be.
To prevent fraud, the coupons contain a bar code which the retailer can scan to make sure the discount being offered is legitimate and that the coupon has not been tampered with. However, some people have figured out the logic within the bar codes and use that knowledge to create fake coupons which the retailer is unable to distinguish from the real thing and which promise discounts of, for example, $7 off an $8 box of chocolates.
In Texas, police have arrested a 22 year old computer science student and charged him with creating coupons that allowed people to claim large discounts for non-existent promotions on food, beer, PlayStations and X-boxes. He is also charged that he posted those coupons to various public websites along with instructions on how to print them off and redeem them at stores. The coupons were very good quality designs, complete with logos and strap lines such as "Powered by SmartSource" (which is a coupon website owned by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp). As a result of his actions, in December alone, Proctor and Gamble says it incurred costs of $200,000 on detergent promotions, even though it had never issued a single online coupon.
By posting these images to public websites rather than use them for personal gain, he might have thought that he was not committing any crime and that it was the people who used the coupons who were the criminals. He might also have thought that the fault lay with the retailers who accepted fake coupons, or the brand owners who have decided to cover the costs so that retailers and small shopkeepers were not left out of pocket. Like many hackers, perhaps he thought he was doing the retailers a favour by exposing the weaknesses in their systems, and perhaps he thought the big brand owners should be grateful for all the free publicity he was giving them. And maybe he thinks that, like shoplifting, its no big deal because everyone does it, the stores can afford it, and they'll have insurance anyway.
The student clearly knew that his actions were not entirely innocent as he used numerous online aliases and anonymising services. He also posted tutorials on how to fake coupons, and included advice such as share the coupons with many people to make it harder for the police to track you down, yet when one coupon site banned him and deleted his forgeries, he claimed to be "baffled" as to why they had done so. The FBI had been investigating him for a year before they were finally able to identify him. He made the mistake of posting from his university IP number.
27th May 2011
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.