Man Hacks Starbucks Gift Card, Creates Money Out Of Thin Air

Gift cards are handy if you don’t know what to buy someone. It can also be used like a prepaid system like iTunes Gift Cards where you can purchase a $50 card for yourself and limit your app purchases to that amount. However it seems that security research Egor Homakov has found a way to hack the Starbucks gift card to create unlimited amounts of money.

According to Homakov (via Business Insider), he claims that this is done by exploiting a bug in payments software systems known as “race conditions”. There’s a bunch of code involved in explaining how this works, but basically it involves transferring the money from one card to the other and because of the bug, he found out how to increase the amount which in turn let him transfer more than what he really had.

Instead of exploiting this and creating a Starbucks card with hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on it, Homakov stopped at $16 and decided to test his hack out at a local Starbucks in which he successfully bought himself an entire meal. He then, for legal reasons, topped up the card an extra $10 so it didn’t look like he was stealing.

Homakov claims that trying to get in touch with Starbucks about the problem was rather difficult. In fact he claims that a Starbucks employee used words like “malicious actions” and “fraud” rather than thanking him, but all in all it appears that the bug has since been resolved, thankfully too given that there has been a recent spate of hacking in which customers have had money stolen through the Starbucks mobile app.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Hacking, starbucks