Link to Story PITTSFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. - You can pump, but you can't hide. Some motorists in Michigan have found out the hard way that you can't just gas and go. They discovered that because of a computer glitch they could swipe their drivers' licenses instead of credit cards to gas up for free at the pumps outside the Meijer chain. A total of 107 people figured it out, many of them students from nearby colleges in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. In some cases people got as many as 15 fillups over a three-week period. Meijer got hosed for thousands. But it turns out the information from each transaction with a drivers' license was stored on computer and police are tracking down the culprits.
in a small town where i grew (yes i know its wrong) they had the older gas pumps, (non digital) rolodex kind. well the glass on the outside was broken and you could stop it going up with your finger. so then all you had to do was pump a dollar or two and fill the whole tank up. it worked for about a year. it was freaking great.
In the UT dorms last year or the year before, a guy figured out he could get free snacks and drinks by swiping his ID and pulling out the ethernet cable before it could charge his account. Soon word spread and everyone was doing it. What they all forgot was the machine recorded everything. So when Housing noticed the discrepancy, they went back and charged everyone for their purchases. They were pissed so they filed criminal charges with the police on $0.50 Cokes and $1.00 Hershey bars. It was a PR nightmare so they dropped the charges, but people on the list wet their pants.
Credit cards have it as a condition that, except when stolen and reported so, you are responsible for all transactions authorized by your credit card, don't they? I am unsure of the liability any individual has for the commerial transactions conducted by his/her driver's liscence. Hence, were they to claim they didn't do it, and didn;t know who did, but that several people have access to their d. l.'s at any given time, I am not sure they couldn't just walk away.
