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Comment by danielodio | Hacker News Reader

I heard that! Looks like Jonathan's social experiment is clashing w/ eBay's "people are good" philosophy... either that or there are a LOT of thirsty people all at the same time.

Regardless, I'm glad we tried it; anyone have any theories of how it's being hacked?

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I guess a way of doing it is to brute force the 8 digit CSC on the website and then transfer funds away from the card.

I hope Starbucks has some mechanism to prevent brute-forcing like this.

I think someone could have bought a SBux card with it. Looks like it has happened at least a few times now all within less than a minute or two of the balance being there. An employee or someone camping a store, perhaps... Is it possible to use the number to buy a card off their website online?

I'll be willing to put another $100 on the card on behalf of @Socialize's SDK Speed Challenge ( http://go.GetSocialize.com/SDK-Challenge) if someone can come up with a way to track who's hacking it. Any ideas?

I wonder what data you could get from reading the actual barcode? Would the CSC be in there?

Edit: I just checked with an online barcode reader and this isnt the case. It resolves to 6061006913522430

How is this post not spam?

is there a way to figure out what store the purchases are coming from?

Someone is DEFINITELY messing with it -- nobody buys exactly $45 in Starbucks: http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10035604975584460...

you never know -- multiple purchases could've added up to $45.00 exactly I guess

I'm inclined to go with Occam's Razor on this one and I am usually Devil's Advocate arguing that highly improbably events don't by themselves prove "guilt". However, multiple such? Even I think this looks very suspicious (and have become somewhat appalled at the amount of money people are willing to throw away to test if this has been hacked or not).

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