Now I ask you, how would you react if you took some cash out of an ATM and the thing gave you four times as much money as you requested? My initial reaction would probably be to slink away and thank my good luck for whoever made the mistake, but later I would probably come to the conclusion that they would catch the error and I would have to pay it back (or simply forfeit the actual amount from my account).

That’s exactly what happened starting a few weeks ago in Virginia Beach, when an as-yet unidentified man entered a gas station with a prepaid ATM card, hacked the machine by entering some codes to bypass the security features, and reprogrammed it to only debit his account one quarter of what he received. A few hours later the same guy came back and made another transaction on the same ATM.

It wasn’t until nine days later that an honest user reported the problem. Can you imagine? “Hey, this ATM is giving out too much money!”