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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.
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.
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.