Man Spoofs GPS To Fake Shop Visits For Profit, Gets Caught (nikkei.com)

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.

Comments

Huh?

[grep -v '.*' *]

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.)

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. ;-) (Man, that's a cheap life. They oughta give him a free soda or something.)

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:So jail for violating an EULA?

[AmiMoJo]

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.