Man Spoofs GPS To Fake Shop Visits For Profit, Gets Caught (nikkei.com) 97
AmiMoJo writes: A man in Japan used GPS spoofing to fake 2.7 million visits to shops in the Aeon Kyushu chain. Each visit rewarded him with two "WAON" points, with the total worth around 5.3 million yen ($45,000). The man used 45 laptops to continually spoof GPS readings and launch the Aeon Kyushu app, collecting two points each time.
So jail for violating an EULA? (Score:2)
So jail for violating an EULA?
Re:So jail for violating an EULA? (Score:5, Insightful)
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store gift cards? or limited gift cards but not real cash?
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Coupons aren't money. If you look at any physical coupon, they state that their monetary value is less than 1/1000th of a cent or some ridiculously low amount (probably the amount the paper is worth to recycle). He was getting electronic coupons, which are worth absolutely no amount of money.
The fault here lies with the idiots running Aeon Kyushu and whoever was responsible for creating their app. You'd have to be really fucking incompetent to not account for something like this.
Aeon Kyushu should fire the
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You can go ahead and not define it as fraud until it is exchanged for goods or services. But it won't make a practical difference.
But no, you don't blame the victims of fraud. It might or might not be poor design, but as you build a better system someone will always build a better hacker.
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Although, TBH, I have a hard time imagining they did not include "actually visit the site" as one of their terms.
But you never know until you read them.
Re:So jail for violating an EULA? (Score:4, Informative)
According to TFA the specific laws are misappropriation and misuse of electromagnetic records. Basically exploiting a flaw in a computer system that you should reasonably have known was not intended, similar to using an exploit to gain access to a system.
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Plain as day.
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Do I really have to say it? Slashdot has been running for, what, 20 years now, and you still haven't worked out you should RTFA before posting?
"suspected misappropriation of electromagnetic records and use of the same." From google translate of the linked article.
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RTFA? Why should I be first?
No, gross stupidity (Score:2)
So jail for violating an EULA?
No, for gross stupidity in attempting fraud. If he had stopped at a few thousand visits he might have got away with it but 2.7 million visits are clearly physically impossible and simply has to be fraud.
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Uh, no. There are many barriers to legally making money, mostly artificially imposed by the people at top to keep everyone else down. It's always easier to make money illegally.
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How exactly would you propose making a quick legal $45.000 with GPS spoofing?
Re: No, gross stupidity (Score:4, Funny)
How exactly would you propose making a quick legal $45.000 with GPS spoofing?
Market it to cheating husbands with suspicious wives.
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Define "visit the store". Did the TOS specifically say a "physical" visit? You might assume that, but how did the company choose (they chose) to measure when a visit took place? That's why contracts and TOS's are so damn long.
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The man misrepresented the facts.
Not so clear.... MERELY lying does not constitute fraud.. there has to be an actual representation which the party Had a right to rely on. The man used a capability of his phone/computers to "Virtually" visit the approximate GPS location of stores without actually driving there in person --- he can make the argument that he represented nothing, or that information was given only to the app on his local phone.
If the 3rd party software provider/developer took the GPS i
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I suspect the Japanese courts are going to be even less swayed by that logic.
The laws are different in Japan.
He wasn't jailed for fraud... he was jailed for misappropriation of electromagnetic records --
or in other words: basically, for exploiting a bug in software on his phone.
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Would you argue that a shoplifter isn't guilty because the store didn't have adequate security
An entirely different thing -- the items on their shelfs are the property of the store.
You can only remove them with the intent to possess them if a store employee agrees that you can have them,
otherwise it would be theft; generally when you go to check out and you are presented a receipt for the items after
being given an amount to pay for them AND you submitted the payment.
On the other hand, If you gave the ca
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This guy goes to jail (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
to fake 2.7 million visits to shops
Really? Let's see: 365 days / year, 18 hours / day (he's got to stop for gas sometime), let's say 45 sites (45 laptops, and I'm ASS-U-ME-ing, and let's say they're all in a circle. (It's been done before [mashable.com].)
;-) (Man, that's a cheap life. They oughta give him a free soda or something.)
Around in the US, I thought a "visit" lasted an hour. Since he's "going" to different store locations, this shouldn't be a problem. And 0 seconds at the store -- he drives up to the front door, the GPS reads his location, and drives off.
For convenience sake, it always takes 10 minutes to reach the next store.
It takes 10 * 45 = 450 minutes for a 45 store transit, or 7.5 hours. Say 7, so 3 complete rotations per day. That's 21 hours (a bit over my 18 hours / day, but he hits a lot of green lights. Or pedestrians, your choice.) That's 3x45 = 135 stores per day. In a year that's 49,000 store visits.
So 2.7 Million visits would take 55 years. So a la Mythbusters: CONFIRMED.
And so he really thought he could get away with it? A million visits (over multiple accounts, that's what the 45 computers were for. Yeah I know. But how much did THEY cost?) That's like the guys in Germany who were getting paid to produce solar power. It was fine, but they noticed one company producing it at night. Bright moon I guess.
I've also heard of geniuses who go to WalMart (or wherever) buy thousands of dollars or merchandise and hand the clerk a million dollar bill. AND WANT THEIR CHANGE.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
I've also heard of geniuses who go to WalMart (or wherever) buy thousands of dollars or merchandise and hand the clerk a million dollar bill. AND WANT THEIR CHANGE.
No, no, no.
A group of counterfeiters had a problem with their printing press and it started print $18 bills. So they figured they'd go to the local Walmart and ask for change. The Walmart person said, "Sure, how do you want it? Three sixes or two nines?"
I'll be here all week. Try the veal!
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No, no, no.
A group of counterfeiters had a problem with their printing press and it started print $18 bills. So they figured they'd go to the local Walmart and ask for change. The Walmart person said, "Sure, how do you want it? Three sixes or two nines?"
And then there was the guy who went to Walmart and tried to pay with a $2 bill. Got the cops called on him by the clueless employees.
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And then there was the guy who went to Walmart and tried to pay with a $2 bill. Got the cops called on him by the clueless employees.
This happened to me at McDonald's on Mission St. in Santa Cruz, except there were no cops involved, only a manager. Cashier was a FOB who'd never seen a $2 bill, and told me it was a fake. Manager knew what it was, though.
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...and then there's guys like Woz [hackaday.com]...
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That's like the guys in Germany who were getting paid to produce solar power. It was fine, but they noticed one company producing it at night.
That was in Spain, not in Germany.
I've also heard of geniuses who go to WalMart (or wherever) buy thousands of dollars or merchandise and hand the clerk a million dollar bill. AND WANT THEIR CHANGE. ...
If that happened to me, I would take the bill, tell him I have to consult my manager and check if it is genuine, and run to my car
Ah, well, the flaw is I usually come
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a famous short story by Mark Twain, titled "The Million Pound Bank Note". It described a young man, the pawn of two wealthy men making a bet, that he could bit survive with only a million pound bank note. The key was for the young man to convince people that he was an eccentric wealthy man, rather than personally poor, and he was never forced to actually _deposit_ the bank note.
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Ah, ha! That sounds funny!!
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It was, from my memories as a child. I also remember Mark Twain as having an appreciation of engineering, with his fascination with riverboats and the adventures of the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
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This shows something I've observed many times over the years: stupid people can be cunning; or alternatively clever people can be idiots.
Interesting 'charge' (Score:2)
Takeshi Fukuoka preliminary police On November 12, police arrested Daigo Sugano (29), an unemployed worker in Hokkaido Ishikari-shi, Hanakawa Northern 2, 2, for suspected misappropriation of electromagnetic records and use of the same. Sugano admits charges.
I'd like to see the actual law on Japanese books that makes this somehow an actual crime.
So just so we're clear, he's being charged with misuse of a magnet, basically. WTF?
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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The GPS spoofing was probably done entirely in software. I suspect the laptops were used to emulate mobile devices.
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And this has to be amateur level. Why 45 laptops instead of hundreds of VMs on a decent workstation/server hardware?
STUPID STUPID STPUPID.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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There used to be competitions to be in the most remote location and take a photograph of yourself. That was before the days of Photoshop, Gimp and other utilities. So people would go hill-climbing or sailing out in the ocean, or find some generic bit of sand dune and say they were in somewhere exotic. Much easier if you can just fake your GPS coordinate.
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Ahh so this is how the moon landing came to be!
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Much easier if you can just fake your GPS coordinate.
Probably mod the contest to require using a specific camera with a built-in GPS that digitally signs the photo stream, and the submitter needing to show the moderator some background info about the location and papers as supporting evidence proving that they went there.
More stupid (Score:2)
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$45K with 45 laptops? (Score:3)
He better be using them cheap laptops for less than $1000 a piece.
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Well, that's not hard. A few minutes on Amazon and I could find laptops for a little over $100. Not very powerful laptops, granted, but he probably didn't need a lot of computing or graphics power to do this.
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And yet if you're using junk like that you could get a dozen or more VMs per physical machine with something a little more powerful. Huge waste of money even if they weren't $1K each.
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And yet if you're using junk like that you could get a dozen or more VMs per physical machine with something a little more powerful. Huge waste of money even if they weren't $1K each.
Maybe he got them for free, or nearly free. Lots of people have offered me free craptops, I've taken some but refused most. And I see low-end laptops and netbooks at flea markets for only a few bucks all the time. Most are probably stolen, but compliance with the law doesn't appear to have been a big priority for this guy.
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Given that he was spoofing GPS, it's possible he might have needed them to be in 45 different locations while he was pulling this off. Bit difficult to do that with VMs.
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Spoofed through software is more likely. Something the Android SDK helps you do, in fact.
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I agree. One of them was the same laptop he used to read Slashdot.
Re: Ad clicks and Ad Bars (Score:4, Interesting)
There were also those ad bars you could download and every 60 seconds they would display another ad an you would get a smaller amount like $.01 for each rotation.
However it 7th grade again when I was at the height of my scheming ways I downloaded my account's ad bars on every computer in the school room and would show up early and run them on 50 computers roughly until everyone else showed up
I was a few years older than you i think, but I did one better on this; ran packet capture software to figure out exactly what the ad bar was saying to the server, then wrote scripts to simulate it without having to show any ads. It meant I could leave them running 24/7 on whichever computers I liked without having to worry about whether anyone was using them. This came in even more useful later on when they started monitoring for mouse movement to make sure you were actually using the computer; the script could simulate those just as easily.
I don't think they ever caught on. Cheques kept coming in right up until I lost interest due to the increasing complexity/security of the ad bar. I wasn't too worried about being caught anyway since, like you, I was a minor at the time.