Last week we told you, with happy hearts, about Jonathan’s Card, the pay-it-forward-y social experiment of an app developer named Jonathan Stark that allowed people to buy cups of coffee for strangers using the barcode of his Starbucks card. Then we learned that the whole thing might have been a stealth Starbucks viral marketing campaign — and our naive little hearts broke a little at the possibility of that — but still, we wanted to believe.
Now things have taken a turn for the truly terrible: Some attention-hungry ballsack figured out a way to hack the card and transfer its funds to himself, using the money good Samaritans loaded onto the card for his own whims. Even better, he decided to tell the world exactly how to do it in a blog post.
Since I don’t find the idea of yuppies buying yuppies coffees very interesting I decided to mix things up a bit. I coded up a script that would alert me whenever the card balance reached a certain threshold (github). And here’s the twist: for the last week I (and others) have been using this script to transfer donated money off Jonathan’s card and onto our own Starbucks gift cards. It’s easy: just head to your local starbucks, pop open your computer, run this script, and when the music plays, cash in.
Through this strategy I’ve personally netted $625 by spending less than 5 hours at Starbucks. That’s enough for an iPad.
The hacker, startup guy Sam Odio, claims that he intended his efforts to be used as a vehicle to divert funds to Save The Children instead (A modern day tech world Robin Hood!), but he seems to fit the classic definition of an as$hole if you ask me.
So, naturally, this has led the death of the whole thing. Over the weekend, Starbucks took Jonathan’s Card out back like she was Ole Yeller and put a bullet in her head.
At 10 p.m. ET Friday, Starbucks reluctantly pulled the plug on Stark’s pay-it-forward social experiment following allegations of fraud or misuse.
Starbucks made the decision to shut down the communal Jonathan’s Card, already in violation of Starbucks Card program terms, after it came to light that funds were being misappropriated.
Adam Brotman, vice president of digital ventures at Starbucks, phoned Stark earlier Friday evening to inform him that the card would be deactivated. Starbucks, he says, was rooting for the experiment from the sidelines, even though the company’s terms do not permit the use of shared registered cards.
To cheer you up now that Sam Odio has single-handedly destroyed your faith in humanity, here’s a video of a great Dane named “Emmitt Thunderpaws” welcoming his owner back home from a military stint. At least we still have dogs. And fashion cats.
(Robin Hood gif via)