I love stories that begin with ” maybe you wonder how I got here “, and this is one that could not even be painted. In this particular case we would see a young engineer surrounded by the greatest possible luxuries, from a seven-figure mansion by a lake to plans to buy a yacht .
The action would stop to give way to the now mythical phrase just before the judge’s gavel hit the table, just seconds after the authority announced a nine-year prison sentence for stealing Xbox gift cards .
A fortune based on Xbox gift cards
It may seem crazy, but you have to know the rest of the story that they collect in Bloomberg to understand why someone would end up in jail for stealing the typical green cards that adorn the shelves near the checkouts of any hypermarket.
Volodymyr Kvashuk – that’s the name of the protagonist of this story – joined Microsoft’s test team with one task, to test the Redmond e-commerce infrastructure. He and his team would be given fake cards that they would use to search for possible errors in the transaction system.
At Microsoft they are not stupid, of course, and the system is prepared so that any purchase made with these cards can be completed without the last step materializing . They could buy laptops, consoles, or any other product from the store, but none of them would physically arrive at their doorstep.
The problem is that the system had a fault. Although it did not send any object to the requested address, when acquiring an Xbox gift card the system did create one of the classic codes that we can find when scratching said cards. A series of figures and letters that, once entered on Microsoft’s redemption website, would add up the amount requested in balance for the account.
152,000 cards and $ 10.1 million
As one of the team members points out, the error found by Kvashuk was the equivalent of the bank manager leaving the door of the safe open in the eyes of anyone. An invitation sweet enough so that, sooner or later, someone decided to reach out.
And so, from scratching from $ 10 to $ 10, the engineer jumped to exchange from $ 100 to $ 100, and from there to create a program that could carry out the entire process without his direct intervention. A game in which, in just two years, he managed to accumulate more than 152,000 Xbox gift cards worth 10.1 million dollars.
The authorities say that the resale of codes with which Kvashuk obtained benefits from the cards reached such a level that he alone controlled the second-hand market and its fluctuation. If there was not enough demand, he turned off the tap so that prices would rise and he could get more cut.
The idea of facing his lawsuit by ensuring that what he was stealing was not real money and did not involve any transaction for Microsoft did not save him from burning. The prosecution did not take long to make him see that the house he had bought did not come from Monopoly money. One of those crazy stories with a happy ending – at least for justice – that would not be surprising if it would hit theaters one day.
