Free Gas!!!...or not
 

Computer glitch gives out free gasoline

May 5, 2004

PITTSFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. -- You can pump, but you can't hide. Some motorists in Michigan have found out the hard way that you can't just gas and go.

They discovered that because of a computer glitch they could swipe their drivers' licenses instead of credit cards to gas up for free at the pumps outside the Meijer chain.

A total of 107 people figured it out, many of them students from nearby colleges in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor.

In some cases people got as many as 15 fillups over a three-week period. Meijer got hosed for thousands.

But it turns out the information from each transaction with a drivers' license was stored on computer and police are tracking down the culprits.



hxxp://www.boston.com/news/odd/articles/2004/05/05/computer_glitch_gives_out_free_gasoline/

this sounds like BS... how could the credit card reader "read" the info from a drivers license?

i'm gonna need Snopes to verify this one for me.

http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/art...scam04-ON.html


Obviously not snopes, but it's another source.

A magstripe reader doesn't care about what the source is...it will read the magstripe of anything swiped through it. The bug must be in how the information is parsed, or not, in this case. Yikes.

A girl I work with has a friend who did QA on that software. Not a ringing endorsement. :)

Man. I used to go to that Meijer ALL THE TIME, and I never realized I could do that!! Bummer.

Sounds like something us in Michigan would do. Funny, even if I knew this trick I'd be a little scared to use my license to get free gas. Oh well, if you did it and got caught that makes it easier for me to laugh at you in the end.

what would be even better is if you got ahold of someone else's license to use...

course, i guess you could just get someone else's credit card to use just as easily...

Go to a grocery store that has a magstrip frequent shopper card. Fill in bogus information. Receieve card. Mission complete.