Slashdot Mirror
Video Poker Firmware Bug Yields Big Money, Federal Charges
JoeyRox writes "Over the course of playing $12 million worth of video poker, Las Vegas resident John Kane stumbled onto a firmware bug in IGT's 'Game King' machines that allowed him to cash out for 10x the amount of his winnings. John and his friends took advantage of the vulnerability to the tune of $429,945. John's friend was arrested by U.S. marshals and charged with violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but a federal magistrate ruled that the law doesn't apply and recommended dismissal. The case is currently being argued in a U.S. District Court."
This looks to me like a civil matter. That is, if there had never been the DMCA. There is a recent trend by big corporations to abuse the criminal court systems to resolve their disputes with the heavy hand of govnernment. I don't think it will stop until we stand up and demand government that is FOR the people.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
The machine is programmed to behave in a certain way. If you handle it in some way, it will give you more money. I'd blame the vendor. Do you blame the customer who goes to the shop where they often overpay him in change for fraud?
Ezekiel 23:20
But that's not the right law to charge him under. Charge him under fraud or stealing, no problem. This is the anti-hacking law- they're charging him with hacking. I don't think this qualifies. It also is the difference between being tried in the federal court system (hacking is a federal crime) vs the state (which owns the laws for theft and fraud).
Either way he should be prosecuted, the question is why and where.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
They have a machine...he didn't sigh any EULA or agreements about how to use it.
The main use of this machine is you put money into it, you hit buttons, it sometimes pays out.
He found a combination of buttons that causes it to pay out a LOT.
I see no problem with what he did. He simply put money in and pushed buttons on machine set out in public for the purpose of people pushing buttons and sometimes getting money out of it.
Show where he violated the signed terms of use or NDA or other type contract on exactly HOW he was to use the machine, and maybe you have a case.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There was a case like this in the UK a few years ago. A family discovered that a particular cash machine was systematically giving out double the amount you had withdrawn. They repeatedly withdrew money using this machine. They were reported, and convicted of fraud. I doubt it would have happened with one-off visitors. If you ONCE visit a cash machine that gives you £200 and deducts from your account the £100 you intended to withdraw, then you've got lucky: you can't have known it would do that. But repeatedly visiting a machine that is misprogrammed to act in your favour, when you know that that is not how it is intended to function, is something quite different. That clearly amounts to fraud.
I don't see this as being a criminal act, but given the way that it was carried out, I think the casino has every right to demand 9/10 of his winnings back.
You win a game at the $1 level, exploit a bug to change your cash level to $10 before accepting the payout, and then accept your payout. Well, you didn't actually make the bet at the $10 level, so you shouldn't expect your winnings to be multiplied by 10, but that's what's happening here. I'd argue that he's still entitled to the original 1x amount and let the casino ban him if they want to.
Long signatures suck.
Exactly. For example if I am playing poker and have a lousy hand, but bid high to trick the other players into folding, then that's fraud too. If I use that trick to make money then I'm stealing from the house.
Right?
How is it fraud? If you tell a machine you want $20 and it gives you $40 (even if you do it repeatedly), you haven't committed an act of deception. I'm not saying it's right or ethical, I'm saying it's not fraud, and it certainly shouldn't be prosecuted that way. Theft by taking, maybe.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The point of the machines (from the player perspective) is to stick in money, push buttons, and make it dispense more money (vouchers) than you put in.
The house edge comes from the fact that pushing the buttons correctly in all situations is difficult.
This guy did it right. If the house wants to fix the "bug" that allowed him to take out more money than they thought he should, that's their right.
Prosecution on this one... very grey area.
But I'll forward the how-to on to my video poker friends, just in case they find a machine with those firmware revisions, so that they'll be sure not to expose themselves to prosecution in this manner.
Then he’d immediately switch to a different game variation, like straight “Draw Poker.” He’d play Draw Poker until he scored a win of any amount at all. The point of this play was to get the machine to offer a “double-up”, which lets the player put his winnings up to simple high-card-wins draw. Through whatever twist of code caused the bug, the appearance of the double-up invitation was critical. Machines that didn’t have the option enabled were immune.
At that point Kane would put more cash, or a voucher, into the machine, then exit the Draw Poker game and switch the denomination to the game maximum — $10 in the Silverton game.
Now when Kane returned to Triple Double Bonus Poker, he’d find his previous $820 win was still showing. He could press the cash-out button from this screen, and the machine would re-award the jackpot. Better yet, it would re-calculate the win at the new denomination level, giving him a hand-payout of $8,200.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Yeah, which happens to be a real problem in the baking industry. I asked for a dozen rolls and got 13. I sensed the baker was trying to make me inadvertently steal, so I threw the last one back at him and called him names. Learn to count.
Video Poker != Poker
Mainly because you're not playing against other players, you're playing against the house who defines the rules (the Gaming Commission is involved enough to make sure that there's a fair chance of winning, but "fair" does not imply "fair to the players").
This happens all of the time with ATM's in the US. It never makes it to court.
When the bank loads an ATM cassette, they know exactly how much money is in it and what denomination of bills it contains. The serial number of the cassette is recorded by the person loading the ATM as well as by the ATM itself, by way of an RFID chip in the cassette. This links back to a database of ATM cassettes and their current load status and contents. The bank knows exactly, down to the serial numbers on the bills, what is in that cassette. Modern ATM's even automate the configuration from that database. The problem is that older ATM's don't.
When you go to an ATM and ask it for $40 (common "fast cash" amount these days), and the ATM has been configured for $20 bills, it dispenses two bills. If it's configured for $10 bills, it dispenses 4 bills. In older ATM's, the configuration is done manually. If a $20 cassette is loaded but the ATM is configured for a $10 cassette, it dispenses the wrong number of bills. That $40 you ask for is 4 bills, but the bills are $20 now, and you get $80.
When this happens, the bank will discover it as soon as they change the ATM cassette. Then they will find EVERY transaction that ATM performed on the previous cassette and contact the account-holders, notifying them that due to an incorrect ATM configuration, they were given more than they requested, and that the account has been rectified to reflect the correct ATM payout. For this transaction, any overdraft fees are waived (by law), and the transaction is applied to the day that the correct is made, not to the day the ATM paid out incorrectly (again, by law).
That's when most people drag their sorry butts back to the bank to make an emergency deposit of some no-longer ill-gotten gains to shore up their account balance.
"Casino error in your favor. Go directly to jail"
Read the article.
He's exploiting the interaction between two different software modules to his advantage. While from a technical perspective he didn't write any assembly to exploit a buffer overflow, he instead used his fingers and eyes to write a mental program which moved his fingers in order to exploit an initialization bug in the software. The software was not clearing out memory it reused for like purposes between two different games, by exploiting this, he was able to increase his winnings by 10x.
He really is using a software exploit and 'hacking' the software. He just isn't using your typical UI to enter and run the hack but he really is exploiting a software bug like metasploit would, or any other attack vector.
This isn't your typical hacking applied to some object that just happens to have a processor. He is hacking the software, and more so, a specific version of the software with specific features enabled. This is no different than an attack targeted at Chrome or Safari, it just seems that way because the UI isn't a terminal window.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"Intentionally abusing a process in bad faith can be a crime,"
no.
"and should be a crime"
never. If this is the case the consumer becomes responsible for every possible mistake. That is a path I don't want to travel.
Do you want a bill for a product you got charged the wrong price for? Do you want to be responsible for any possible mistake a store/corporation might do?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is why the Gaming Commission is required to test/inspect the machines (to include deposits and payouts) on a regular basis. Until you have evidence that this is happening you're just trying to justify theft. If the machine were found to be faulty, the individual would have their provable losses returned to them, probably up to a few hundred dollars.
That sounds just peachy - Except that the machines in question had the exact same tests done to them, and still contained a bug that no one had caught for who knows how long.
It counts as pure hubris to claim that bugs in the opposite direction (opposed to the player) don't exist and remain uncaught.
That said, the definition of "fraud" here has a lot of flexibility. I recall a case from my youth (when I worked for a competitor of IGT, for whatever credibility that gives me) where someone cracked our RNG algorithm on a "pick 3" type game. After they had won a few hundred grand, the jurisdiction asked us to look into it, and we changed the RNG, the player stopped winning game after game after game. No charges ever followed, because it shouldn't count as fraud if you figure out how to win the fucking game, even though an entire state government lost a noticeable amount of money.