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A man won £1.7 MILLION playing blackjack online at 1am. The casino called the next morning to congratulate him. Then called back two days later to say there was a software glitch and they were keeping the money. They offered him £60,000 to stay quiet and sign a document promising never to talk about it. He said no. – Andrew Green was a 54 year old from a small village in Lincolnshire England. – Just after midnight on January 26 2018 he opened the Betfred app and started playing a blackjack game called Frankie Dettori's Magic Seven. – He played for five and a half hours straight. – When he finally stopped the screen showed £1,722,500.24 in winnings. – He called Betfred. They congratulated him. Told him to call back after 9:30am to arrange collection. – He went out that night and celebrated with his family. Spent £2,500 on dinner. He was already a millionaire in his head. – Monday morning he called back. They said the win was so large it needed to be sent to the game provider Playtech for verification. Standard procedure they said. – Wednesday Betfred called again. Playtech had found a software glitch. The win was void and he would not be paid. – Their offer was £60,000 but on one condition. He had to sign a non-disclosure agreement promising never to discuss what had happened. – He said no. – He sued and the case went to the High Court in London. – The judge ruled Betfred's terms and conditions were not transparent and not fair. They could not rely on them to withhold payment. – Three years after he won the money the court ordered Betfred to pay the full £1.7 MILLION plus interest. – Standing outside the High Court he said "The last three years have felt like hell on earth. I think Betfred have treated me abysmally." – Betfred apologised for the delay. – They never explained how many other players hit the same glitch and quietly accepted the £60,000. A man won £1.7 MILLION at 1am, spent £2,500 celebrating before the money arrived, then spent three years in court to collect what was already his.
Aisar3,241,792 görüntüleme • 18 saat önce
A single mother put 40 cents into a slot machine at a New York casino and won $43 MILLION. The casino offered her a steak dinner and $2.25 instead. A judge sided with the casino. She walked away with nothing. – Katrina Bookman grew up in foster care. – She was homeless as a teenager. Raised four kids on her own as a single mother in New York. – On August 5 2016 she walked into Resorts World Casino in Queens and put 40 cents into a slot machine called Sphinx Wild. – Bells went off. Lights flashed. The screen displayed her winnings in full. $42,949,672.76. The biggest slot machine jackpot in American history. – She took a selfie with the screen. She was already planning what to do with the money. – A MILLION dollars for her son who wanted to open a barbershop. – A casino employee told her to come back the next day to collect her winnings after an official review. – The next day the casino told her the machine had malfunctioned. She had won nothing. – They offered her $2.25, the amount showing on her printed ticket and a complimentary steak dinner as a gesture of goodwill. – She said "Really? Are you serious? I felt insulted." – She refused both and hired a lawyer. – She filed a 17 page lawsuit against the casino, its parent company, and the slot machine manufacturer. – Her lawyer argued that even if the $43 MILLION was a malfunction the machine's maximum legitimate jackpot was $6,500. The casino should pay at least that. The casino refused even that. – The New York State Gaming Commission confirmed the malfunction. – Every machine in the casino had a small disclaimer printed on it: "Malfunctions void all pays and plays." – After years of delays including COVID the case finally went to court. – A judge at Queens County Supreme Court ruled in favor of the casino. – Katrina Bookman walked away with nothing. – Not the $43 MILLION, not the $6,500. Not even the steak dinner. A single mother who grew up in foster care put 40 cents into a machine, watched it display $43 MILLION, took a selfie, came back the next day and was handed $2.25 and a dinner reservation.
Aisar16,985,770 görüntüleme • 16 gün önce
A New Jersey construction worker secretly claimed a $24 MILLION lottery jackpot without telling his coworkers. He had been buying tickets together with them for years as a group. He told them he was taking time off work for foot surgery. He had actually quit to collect his winnings. A year later they found out. – Americo Lopes was a Portuguese immigrant living in Elizabeth New Jersey. – He worked as a construction worker and had been buying Mega Millions lottery tickets every week as part of a five-man work syndicate with his colleagues for years. – In November 2009 he claimed a $38.5 MILLION Mega Millions jackpot and chose the lump sum payout of $24 MILLION after taxes. – He told his coworkers he needed foot surgery and would be taking time off work. He never went back. – For nearly a year none of his coworkers knew what had happened to him. – Then one of them discovered the truth – Lopes had claimed the jackpot that their group had won together and kept every dollar. – Five coworkers sued him in 2010. They provided evidence in court of their longstanding arrangement to pool money and split any winnings equally. The group had been playing together for years. – Lopes argued the winning ticket was purchased with his own personal money and had nothing to do with the syndicate. He said the group arrangement had ended before the winning draw. – The jury did not believe him. They ruled in favour of his five coworkers and ordered Lopes to hand over $20 MILLION, leaving him with just $4 MILLION of his original $24 MILLION payout. – He had also already spent a significant portion. – He had bought a million-dollar home and moved out of his working class Elizabeth neighbourhood within weeks of the win. – His coworkers each received approximately $4 MILLION after the court order. A construction worker secretly claimed a $24 MILLION jackpot his work group had won together, told his colleagues he needed foot surgery, and quietly moved into a million dollar house. A jury gave $20 MILLION of it back to the people he stole it from.
Aisar2,533,599 görüntüleme • 4 gün önce
A professional poker player found a manufacturing flaw on the back of a deck of casino playing cards. He used it to win $19 MILLION at two casinos on two continents. Courts on both continents ruled it was cheating and made him give almost all of it back. – Phil Ivey is a ten-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner. – Widely considered one of the best professional gamblers alive. – In April 2012 he booked a private high-stakes baccarat session at the Borgata in Atlantic City. – He wired a $1 MILLION deposit up front. – He made specific requests. A private pit, a Mandarin-speaking dealer. – His guest Kelly Sun seated beside him. One single deck of purple Gemaco cards for the entire session. An automatic shuffler. – The Borgata agreed to all of it. – Sun had spotted something. Certain decks had a tiny factory defect. A slightly uneven diamond pattern on the card backs. – She asked the dealer to rotate specific high-value cards 180 degrees. – Told him it was superstition. For luck. – It wasn't luck. – Once enough key cards were flipped, she and Ivey could read the edge of the next card in the shoe before it was dealt. – Ivey bet accordingly. – Four visits to the Borgata in 2012 and he won $9.6 MILLION. – Same trick, different casino. – Crockfords in London. Just under £8 MILLION was won playing punto banco. – Crockfords caught the pattern and refused to pay. – Ivey sued them, he argued it wasn't cheating, just exploiting how the casino chose to deal. – The case reached the UK Supreme Court. All five judges ruled against him. – They said he took deliberate steps to fix the deck. – Meanwhile, the Borgata had already paid him his $9.6 MILLION back in 2012. – Once they found out how, they sued to get it back. – A US court ruled it wasn't technically fraud. But it broke New Jersey's Casino Control Act. – Ivey was ordered to repay $10,130,000. – He appealed. The Borgata spent years trying to actually collect, at one point seizing his winnings at the World Series of Poker. – In July 2020, eight years after the first hand was dealt. Ivey and the Borgata settled. Terms never made public. He never touched a card, never marked one. He just asked a dealer to turn a few of them around "for luck." Two countries' highest courts still called it a con.
Aisar1,019,721 görüntüleme • 3 gün önce
A Florida couple taped two losing lottery tickets together, drove to the lottery office to claim $1 MILLION and told investigators they were "honest people who aren't into fraud." The lottery agent spotted the fake in seconds. They had signed their real names on the claim form. – Kira Enders and her boyfriend Dakota Jones lived in DeFuniak Springs in northern Florida. – In March 2024 Enders took a $50 scratch card called 500X The Cash to the Florida Lottery office in Pensacola and submitted a claim for $1 MILLION. – The ticket was two separate losing scratch cards ripped horizontally and taped together. – Then laminated to hide the joins. The words on the back of the two halves did not match. – Lottery officials identified it as fake within seconds of seeing it. – Before she submitted the claim Enders had already taken the ticket to three different stores to scan it. – All three machines said it was not a winner. She went to the lottery office anyway. – She had written her full name and home address on the official claim form. – She had signed an acknowledgment of the penalties for submitting a fraudulent ticket. – A lottery special agent called her six days later and asked her to come in to sign paperwork for her large prize claim. She drove straight back with Jones. – They were arrested the moment they walked through the door. – Both told investigators completely different stories about where the ticket came from. – Jones told investigators Enders knew the numbers did not match. Enders told investigators Jones had nothing to do with it. – Jones told the arresting officer "we are honest people and we are not into fraud." – The sheriff said publicly "if you are going to try to claim a million dollars you have got to do a lot better than this." – Both face charges including forgery and grand theft over $100,000 which carries a maximum of 40 years in prison. They taped two losing tickets together, laminated them, drove to the lottery office, signed their real names on the fraud form, got caught in seconds, came back six days later when investigators called, and told police they were honest people.
Aisar1,798,520 görüntüleme • 6 gün önce
A Bronx butcher filled giant tanks with seawater, floated a thin layer of oil on top, and convinced 51 banks including American Express that he owned $1.9 BILLION pounds of salad oil. He owned 110 million. The fraud collapsed on the same day JFK was assassinated. Warren Buffett made more money from it than the man who ran it. – Anthony "Tino" De Angelis grew up in the Bronx and left school young. – He built a soybean oil refinery in Bayonne New Jersey and by 1962 was handling 75 percent of all US soybean oil exports. – To borrow money he needed physical inventory. Banks would inspect it and lend against it. – Oil floats on water. Tino knew this. – He filled his storage tanks, some as tall as five storey buildings, almost entirely with seawater and added only a few feet of oil on top. – When American Express inspectors arrived they lowered weighted tape measures into the tanks. The tapes came back coated in oil. The tanks appeared full. Everyone signed off. – His crew also built hidden metal cylinders inside certain tanks directly below the inspection hatch so the tape only measured oil and never reached the water below. – When inspectors wanted to check the same tanks twice his crew used hidden pipes to pump the same small amount of oil from tank to tank so it was always at the top wherever they looked. – American Express vouched for all of it. 51 banks lent against the receipts. Chase Manhattan. Bank of America. Procter and Gamble. Everyone was in. – By 1963 De Angelis had filed receipts claiming 1.9 BILLION pounds of salad oil. – The US Department of Agriculture confirmed the entire country only produced 110 million pounds. – Nobody checked. – The market crashed in November 1963. Allied Crude filed for bankruptcy. Two Wall Street brokerages collapsed. American Express took a $58 MILLION hit. – On November 22 1963 while investigators were still untangling the fraud President Kennedy was assassinated. The New York Stock Exchange closed 83 minutes early because of both. – De Angelis served seven years. Walked out and immediately ran the same fraud again using hogs instead of oil. – Warren Buffett bought 5 percent of American Express after its stock collapsed for $20 MILLION. It became one of his most famous investments. A Bronx butcher fooled 51 of the most powerful financial institutions in the world with seawater and a layer of oil. Served seven years and did it again for the second time.
Aisar669,417 görüntüleme • 8 gün önce
A Nebraska businessman sold his company for $500 MILLION, got bored, and walked into a casino. In one year he lost $127 MILLION. The casino kept giving him vodka and painkillers in a candy box to keep him at the table. He sued them for it. They fined the casino $225,000. – Terrance Watanabe spent 25 years building Oriental Trading Company – His family's party-favor import business in Omaha, Nebraska, into one of the largest mail-order retailers in America. – In 2000 he sold it. His net worth was around $500 MILLION. – Then he had nothing to do. – He discovered a Harrah's casino across the river in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Started going to pass the time. – By 2005 he was flying to Las Vegas regularly. By 2006, he was living there full-time. – Steve Wynn noticed him at the Wynn casino and called him into a private meeting. – He could see that Watanabe was a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic. – He banned him from the property not wanting to violate Nevada law, which prohibits casinos from letting visibly intoxicated people gamble. – Harrah's called him the same week. They offered $12,500 a month in airfare, Rolling Stones tickets, $500,000 in gift store credit, and 15% cash back on any table losses over $500,000. – They gave him a free three-bedroom suite at Caesars Palace and he accepted. – 2007 Terrance Watanabe bet $825 MILLION across Caesars Palace and The Rio. – The largest amount ever wagered by a single individual in Las Vegas history. – He lost $127 MILLION of it. One man generated 5.6% of Harrah's entire Las Vegas gambling revenue that year. – Casino staff kept him supplied with his preferred vodka at all times. – When he became addicted to prescription painkillers, staff delivered Lortabs to him at the table hidden inside boxes of candy. – He sometimes played for 24 hours straight and once lost $5 MILLION in a single day. – At one point he played three blackjack hands simultaneously at $50,000 per hand. – His sister showed up at Thanksgiving 2007 and had no idea what had happened. She took him home to Nebraska. He went to rehab. – When the lawyers started tallying the losses, the real number wasn't $127 million. After Harrah's was forced to hand over their internal records, it came to $204 MILLION. – He sued Harrah's for $20 MILLION, claiming they had kept him intoxicated to keep him gambling. The Nevada Gaming Control Board opened its own investigation. – The casino was fined $225,000 for allowing him to gamble while visibly intoxicated. All criminal charges against Watanabe were dropped as part of a global settlement. The terms were confidential.
Aisar1,776,361 görüntüleme • 20 gün önce
A gas station owner in New Zealand applied for a $100,000 bank overdraft. The bank made a typo and gave him $7 MILLION by mistake. He spent it all in 28 days, fled to China, and triggered an international manhunt. – Hui Gao owned a small gas station in Rotorua, New Zealand with his mother. In April 2009 he applied to Westpac Bank for a $100,000 overdraft to help run the business. – The bank approved it. But when the employee typed in the figure they added two extra zeros by mistake. – Gao woke up the next morning and checked his account. $7 MILLION was sitting there. – He called his girlfriend and told her he was "f***ing rich" and had MILLIONS of dollars. – They did not call the bank. – In less than 28 days the couple withdrew $6.8 MILLION from the account. Transferred it to accounts in Hong Kong and China. – Then Gao fled to Hong Kong. His girlfriend followed days later. They left behind her six year old daughter. – New Zealand police launched an international manhunt. Interpol also got involved. – He was eventually caught. Sentenced to four years and seven months in prison. – His girlfriend got nine months of home detention. – The court ordered her to pay back the money at $60 a week. – At $60 a week it would take her approximately 2,192 years to pay it back. A man applied for a $100,000 bank overdraft. The bank employee added two extra zeros by mistake. He spent $6.8 million in 28 days, fled to China with his girlfriend, and left her six year old daughter behind.
Aisar1,470,165 görüntüleme • 18 gün önce
A judge dropped his pants off at a dry cleaner in Washington DC. The cleaner lost them. He sued for $54 MILLION. The cleaner offered him $12,000 to settle. He said no. He lost the case, lost his job and was suspended from practicing law. – Roy Pearson was an administrative law judge in Washington DC, the kind of person who spends their days deciding whether other people's lawsuits have merit. – In May 2005 he dropped a pair of gray trousers off at Custom Cleaners, a small dry cleaning shop owned by Korean immigrants Jin and Soo Chung. – When he came back to collect them the pants were missing. The Chungs said they had found a pair they believed were his. Pearson said they were not his pants. – He demanded $1,000 for a replacement suit. The Chungs refused. – So Pearson filed a lawsuit. He initially asked for $67 MILLION. He later reduced it to a more "reasonable" $54 MILLION. – His legal argument was built around two signs in the window of the dry cleaner. "Satisfaction Guaranteed" and "Same Day Service." – Pearson argued those signs represented an unconditional unlimited promise and that any customer who was not satisfied could demand any compensation whatsoever. – The $54 MILLION broke down as follows. – $500,000 in attorney fees even though he was representing himself. – $2 MILLION for personal inconvenience and mental distress. – $90,000 to rent a car for ten years to drive to a different dry cleaner and $51.5 MILLION in additional damages on behalf of every DC resident he claimed was at risk from misleading dry cleaner signage. – On the witness stand Pearson broke down in tears. – He had to take a break from testifying because he became too emotional while questioning himself about his own emotional distress. – The Chungs made three settlement offers. $3,000 then $4,600 and then $12,000. Pearson rejected all three. – The two years of legal fees forced the Chungs to close two of their three dry cleaning shops. – Judge Judith Bartnoff ruled in favor of the Chungs. She ordered Pearson to pay their court costs of $1,000. She wrote in her ruling: "A reasonable consumer would not interpret Satisfaction Guaranteed to mean that a merchant is required to satisfy a customer's unreasonable demands." – Pearson appealed and the appeal was rejected. He appealed again and was rejected again. – He lost his judgeship in 2007. He sued for wrongful termination. He lost that too. > In 2020 the DC Court of Appeals suspended him from practicing law for 90 days. They called his damages figure "shocking" and said his litigation tactics had "crossed the boundary into abusiveness." A judge who spent his career deciding if other people's lawsuits had merit sued a dry cleaner for $54 MILLION over a pair of pants. Turned down $12,000. Lost the case. Lost his job. Lost his law license for 90 days.
Aisar735,301 görüntüleme • 11 gün önce
A man deposited a fake junk mail check for $95,000 as a joke. The bank cleared it. Six lawyers told him it was legally his money. He gave it all back anyway. – Patrick Combs was 29, living in San Francisco in 1995 with $200 in his bank account when a junk mail letter arrived offering him a get-rich-quick scheme. – Inside was a promotional fake check made out in his name for $95,093.35. Printed across the front in clear letters: NOT NEGOTIABLE. – In a moment of dark humor he signed the back with a smiley face and deposited it at an ATM. – He expected the bank to call him laughing. They never called. – Ten days later he checked his balance. $101,217.34. The check had cleared. – The promotional check was so close in design to a real check that it legally qualified as one under banking law. – By the time the bank realized what had happened it was legally too late to recall the funds. – Combs called his brother who told him to move the money immediately. – He tried to withdraw $95,000 in cash. He learned three things. All the large safe deposit boxes were taken, $500 bills no longer existed, and $95,000 in $100 bills did not fit in a small box. – He got a cashier's check instead and locked it in a safe-deposit box. – When the bank finally came for the money a month later they accused him of fraud and threatened police. – He refused to return anything until they admitted in writing that they had made the mistake, not him. – Six different lawyers reviewed his case and told him the money was legally his to keep. – The bank and Combs went to war for five months. He gave interviews on television and in newspapers. The public loved him. – He eventually gave every dollar back. All he wanted in return was a signed letter clearing him of any wrongdoing and lunch with the bank president. He got the letter but not the lunch. – He turned the entire story into a one-man show called Man 1 Bank 0 and performed it 2,000 times across the world. A man deposited a fake check as a joke with a smiley face signature. The tenth-largest bank in America cleared it.
Aisar3,105,286 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
A man sold a website with no profits to Yahoo for $5.7 BILLION on April Fool's Day. Yahoo thought it was the deal of the century. They shut it down three years later. – Mark Cuban grew up in Pittsburgh selling garbage bags door to door at 12 to afford basketball sneakers. – In 1995 he started a company called The idea was simple. Let people listen to out of town sports radio on the internet. That was the whole company. – In 1998 he took it public. On the first day of trading the stock jumped 250 percent. The company hit $1 BILLION in value. Cubans owned 30 percent of it. – They had 570,000 users. The company had never made a single dollar of profit. – Yahoo was in a war with AOL and Microsoft to become the dominant homepage of the internet. – They were spending BILLIONS buying anything that looked like the future. – On April 1 1999, April Fool's Day Yahoo bought for $5.7 BILLION. Cuban's personal share was $1.4 BILLION. – But Cuban was nervous. The dot-com bubble was clearly out of control. So he paid $20 MILLION in fees to Wall Street banks to lock in a guaranteed price on his Yahoo shares before the market crashed. – Six months later the bubble burst. Yahoo stock fell from $300 to $5 per share. Had he held on his $1.4 BILLION would have been worth $25 MILLION. – He walked away with every dollar. Wall Street called it one of the top ten trades of all time. – Yahoo shut down in 2002. Three years after paying $5.7 BILLION for it. – In 2017 Verizon bought all of Yahoo for $4.5 BILLION. Less than what Yahoo paid for Cuban's website alone. – Cuban used the money to buy the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and became one of the most famous investors on Shark Tank. A website with no profits sold for $5.7 BILLION on April Fool's Day and shut down three years later.
Aisar1,077,498 görüntüleme • 18 gün önce
A businessman flew into Vegas for the Super Bowl and got served drink after drink until he blacked out. He lost $500,000 he doesn't remember losing. The casino kept raising his credit line the whole time. He sued them for it. – Mark Johnston owned a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Los Angeles. – He flew into Las Vegas the Thursday before Super Bowl weekend, 2014, already drinking on the plane. – By dinner that night he'd had roughly 10 drinks. Then he hit the casino floor at the Downtown Grand. – Over the next 17 hours, staff served him about 20 more. – His credit line started at $250,000. The casino raised it. Then raised it again. All the way to $500,000. – Chips dropped on the floor. Words slurring and he was unable to read his own cards, according to staff. – Total blackout, he lost the full $500,000 and remembers almost none of it. – Nevada law bans casinos from letting a visibly intoxicated person gamble or serving them more alcohol. – He hired a lawyer and sued the Downtown Grand. – Days later, a casino rep allegedly called a rival casino to warn them off Johnston over his debt. – The Nevada Gaming Control Board opened its own investigation into the casino. – "This is about you almost killing me," Johnston told reporters. "What if I had choked and died?" A man was handed twenty drinks in seventeen hours, blacked out, and lost half a MILLION dollars he can't remember losing while the casino kept raising his credit line the entire time.
Aisar642,905 görüntüleme • 12 gün önce
A Filipino geologist filed gold flakes off his own wedding ring, convinced the world he found the largest gold deposit in history, and built a $6 BILLION company out of jungle dirt. There was no gold. Nobody went to prison. – Michael de Guzman was hired to test a jungle site in Borneo that twelve mining companies had already abandoned as worthless. – He filed gold flakes off his own wedding ring and mixed them into the crushed rock samples before sending them to the lab. – When results kept coming back positive he spent $61,000 buying gold from local river panners and added it to samples in precise quantities to avoid raising suspicion. – Bre-X went from a 30 cent penny stock to $286 per share. Lehman Brothers called it the gold discovery of the century. – The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan invested and lost $100 MILLION. The Quebec public pension fund lost $70 MILLION. Mutual funds across North America piled in. – Freeport-McMoRan, one of the largest mining companies on earth, was brought in to verify the site. They drilled one metre away from every hole Bre-X had drilled. – They found nothing. Insignificant amounts of gold across every single test. – On March 19 1997 de Guzman boarded a helicopter to meet Freeport executives. The pilot was a former Indonesian military officer who did not normally fly the route. – Twenty minutes into the flight the rear door opened. He fell 265 metres into the jungle below. – His body was recovered four days later. Decomposed. Missing its hands and feet. Evidence of strangulation on the neck. Cremated immediately without DNA testing. – The stock crashed 80 percent in a single day. $6 BILLION wiped out and 40,000 investors lost everything. – Nobody was ever criminally convicted. – One of his five wives received a $25,000 wire transfer from a Citibank branch in Brazil years after his funeral. The fax was written in handwriting she recognised as his. – Sightings of him alive were reported in the Philippines and South America for years afterwards. The biggest gold fraud in history was built with a wedding ring and $61,000 in river gold. The body that fell from the helicopter was cremated before DNA testing could confirm who it was.
Aisar513,018 görüntüleme • 10 gün önce
A broke gambler found a bug in a Las Vegas casino's video poker machine. He called his friend. Between them, they took $500,000 from casinos across America. The FBI charged them with hacking. A judge threw the case out because pressing buttons on a slot machine is not hacking. – John Kane had spent years losing money in Las Vegas casinos. – By 2009 he was a regular at the Fremont Casino, feeding money into the same IGT Game King video poker machines everyone else played. – Then one afternoon he pressed the buttons in an unusual sequence and something happened that wasn't supposed to happen. – The machine let him replay a previous winning hand at ten times the original bet. – He sat completely still. Then he did it again. – He called his friend Andre Nestor in Pennsylvania and told him to get on a plane. – Together they worked out the full sequence. You lost small at the lowest denomination. When you finally hit a big hand, you switched to the highest denomination and replayed it. – The machine paid out at the higher rate every time. – The four machines they normally played at the Fremont brought the casino $14,500 a month. – After Kane and Nestor discovered the bug those same four machines cost the casino $75,000 a month. – Kane took $100,000 from the Fremont alone. Then they spread out, the Hilton, the Stratosphere, the Hard Rock, the Tropicana, the Luxor, the Wynn. In Vegas, Kane accumulated over $500,000. – Nestor went back to Pennsylvania and hit The Meadows Casino for nearly $480,000 in two months. – Casino surveillance caught on. Kane was handcuffed to a chair in a back room at the Silverton Casino mid-session. – The FBI charged both men with hacking under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law used to prosecute cybercriminals. – Their lawyers argued one thing: pressing the buttons on a machine exactly as designed is not hacking. – A video poker machine is not a protected computer under federal law. – The judge agreed. Hacking charges dismissed entirely. – The prosecution tried a deal, testify against your friend and walk free. Both refused. – The wire fraud charges were eventually dropped too. – Neither man went to prison. Kane went home and started teaching piano. Nestor went home broke, and the IRS came for $240,000 in back taxes on his winnings. – IGT quietly patched every Game King machine in America. Two men found a bug in a Las Vegas video poker machine and took $500,000 from casinos across America by pressing buttons in the right sequence. The FBI called it hacking. A federal judge called it playing the game.
Aisar1,371,275 görüntüleme • 27 gün önce
For years Walmart made $300 MILLION sending demand letters to people accused of shoplifting. Many were never convicted. Some were never guilty. One of them refused to pay and a jury gave her $2.1 MILLION. – Lesleigh Nurse was a mother of three from Semmes, Alabama. – In November 2016 she went to her local Walmart with her husband and three children. – She used the self-checkout but the scanner froze. – A Walmart associate came over and helped her through it. She left thinking everything was resolved. – An asset protection manager stopped her outside. She was accused of stealing 11 items including Christmas lights, a loaf of bread and a box of Cap'n Crunch with a total value to about $48. – She was arrested for shoplifting. – A year later the criminal case was dismissed after the Walmart employee failed to appear in court. – One month later a Florida law firm sent her a letter on behalf of Walmart. – Pay $200 or face a civil lawsuit. The demand was even more than the groceries she was accused of stealing. – She refused and in her words “I didn't do anything wrong. Why would I pay for something I didn't do?" – During the trial that followed a law professor testified that in a two year period Walmart had charged 1.4 MILLION people across America with criminal theft and collected $300 MILLION through these demand letters. – Many had never been convicted. Some had never been guilty. – Walmart never produced the self-checkout surveillance footage that would have proved whether she stole anything or not. – "It would have shown the truth and they didn't want the truth to be shown," she said. – A Mobile County jury unanimously awarded her $2.1 MILLION in November 2021. – Walmart filed a motion asking the court to throw out the verdict entirely. Next time your self-checkout scanner freezes at Walmart remember there is a system built to send you a bill whether you are guilty or not. 1.4 million people paid it. She was the one who said no.
Aisar1,213,832 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
A retired convenience store owner read a lottery brochure for 3 minutes and found a loophole the state missed. He and his wife made $26 MILLION and got a Hollywood film. – In 2003 Jerry Selbee walked into a corner store he used to own in Evart Michigan and picked up a brochure for a new lottery game called Winfall. – He read it standing up and in less than 3 minutes spotted something the state had missed entirely. – When nobody won the jackpot and it hit $5 MILLION the prize rolled down to lower tier winners dramatically boosting their payouts. – He did the math. If he spent $1,100 on tickets during a rolldown he would statistically guarantee an $800 profit every single time. – He bought $3,600 in tickets on his first try and made $2,700. – He bought $8,000 worth and nearly doubled it. – He still had not told his wife Marge – One night sitting by a campfire he finally told her. – She said nothing for a long moment. Then said she could see the numbers. – They formed a corporation called GS Investment Strategies and sold $500 shares to their six children friends and neighbours including three state troopers a factory plant manager and a bank vice president. – They drove 900 miles to Massachusetts every six weeks when a rolldown hit spending up to $720,000 on tickets in a single session. – They checked into a motel room and spent hours sorting through 360,000 tickets by hand. – In 2011 the Boston Globe investigated and found no wrongdoing. – The state made $120 million from the Selbees buying tickets. – An officer said "I was dumbfoundedly amazed that these math nerd geniuses had found a way legally to win a state lottery". – Their corporation grossed $26 million over 9 years with nearly $8 million in profit after taxes. – They kept 65 plastic tubs of losing tickets in their barn in case of a federal audit. – They never bought a hot tub a sports car or a timeshare. – Bryan Cranston played Jerry in the 2022 Hollywood film Jerry and Marge Go Large. – The original 60 Minutes interview is on YouTube right now. He found a loophole in a state lottery brochure in 3 minutes that the state missed for years. Made $26 MILLION legally and got a Hollywood film.
Aisar3,215,452 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
A civil engineer spotted a promotion on a pudding cup. He did the math in his head. Then he spent $3,140 buying 12,150 cups of chocolate pudding and walked away with 1.25 MILLION airline miles. – David Phillips was a civil engineer at UC Davis in 1999 when he walked down the frozen food aisle of his local grocery store. – He spotted a Healthy Choice promotion on the shelf. – Buy 10 products, mail in the barcodes, get 1,000 airline miles. – Early-bird bonus if you mailed them before June 1st, the rate doubled to 1,000 miles per 5 barcodes. – He did the math. At $2 per frozen meal the deal was decent. Then he wandered to the next aisle. – Individual Healthy Choice chocolate pudding cups. 25 cents each. Each cup had its own barcode. The promotion didn't specify meal size. – He went home and built a spreadsheet. – Then he drove to the bank, withdrew cash, and told his wife they needed to buy as much pudding as they possibly could. – He emptied every Grocery Outlet in the Sacramento Valley. Ten stores in total. 12,150 individual pudding cups. – Total spent: $3,140. – There was one problem. Each cup needed its barcode cut out and mailed in before the June 1st deadline. There were 12,150 of them. He couldn't do it alone. – He drove to the local Salvation Army and made a deal. Volunteers would cut out every barcode. In exchange he would donate all 12,150 cups of pudding to their soup kitchen. – They agreed. – He mailed the barcodes. Then waited. – Then large packages started arriving from Healthy Choice. Then more packages. Then more. – In total: 2,506 certificates, each worth 500 miles. – 1,253,000 airline miles. Enough for 31 round trips to Europe. – Healthy Choice never tried to fight it. The promotion said any product. The pudding was a product. He followed every rule exactly as written. – He also claimed an $815 tax deduction for donating the pudding. – American Airlines gave him lifetime Gold status for crossing one million miles on their program. – His story became famous enough that Adam Sandler based his character in the 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love directly on him. – He has since used the miles to take his family to 43 countries across the world. A civil engineer found a promotion on a 25 cent pudding cup, bought 12,150 of them, donated all the pudding to the Salvation Army, and walked away with 1.25 MILLION airline miles. The company honored every single one.
Aisar884,721 görüntüleme • 28 gün önce
A rude stranger bumped into a woman at a supermarket, didn't apologize, and kept walking. She won $10 MILLION because of it. – LaQuedra Edwards had $40. That was her lottery budget. Forty dollars, same as always. – In November 2021, she walked into a Vons supermarket in Tarzana, Los Angeles, fed her $40 into the Scratchers vending machine, and started picking her usual cheaper tickets. – Then someone walked into her from behind. – Hard enough to knock her hand into the wrong button. – Out came a $30 ticket she never asked for. – A single ticket had just swallowed 75% of her entire budget. – The man didn't stop. Didn't turn around or even say a word. He just walked out the door. – She stood there, annoyed, holding a ticket she didn't want. – She got in her car and started scratching while still annoyed. – Then she stopped. She looked at the ticket. Then looked again. – She got on the 405 freeway, one of the busiest highways in America, and could not stop glancing down at what was in her hand. – She almost crashed her car. – She pulled over, opened the California Lottery app and scanned the ticket. – She said this out loud “This can't be right” and she scanned it again. – The $30 ticket she bought by accident was the top prize winner. 10 MILLION dollars won by accident. – *"All I remember saying once I found out how much I just won was: I'm rich."* – She bought a house and she started a nonprofit. – The Vons store got a $50,000 bonus for selling the winning ticket. – The man who bumped into her never found out. A stranger bumped into a woman at a Los Angeles supermarket, didn't say a word, and kept walking. She won $10 MILLION because of it.
Aisar736,221 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
A human error at Citibank sent $900 MILLION instead of $7.8 MILLION to lenders. Ten of them refused to return it. A federal judge ruled the money was legally theirs. – In 2020 Citibank was processing a routine $7.8 MILLION interest payment on behalf of Revlon, the struggling cosmetics company. – Their internal payment system required a complex series of steps. During the process their operations team made one error. – Instead of directing the $900 MILLION principal balance to an internal holding account they sent it directly to the lenders. – Citibank wired $900 MILLION of its own money overnight. A loan not due until 2023 had just been paid off in full. By accident. – They realized the mistake the next morning and immediately asked every lender to return the money. Most did but ten of them refused. – Those ten lenders kept $504 MILLION combined. – Their argument was Revlon owed them the money anyway so they had no reason to believe one of the most powerful banks in the world had just made a $900 MILLION mistake. – Citibank sued and the case went to federal court in Manhattan. – Judge Jesse Furman called it "one of the biggest blunders in banking history." Then ruled the ten lenders did not have to return a single dollar. – His reasoning, to believe Citibank had made a mistake of nearly $1 BILLION would have been borderline irrational. – Regulators fined Citibank $400 MILLION separately for internal control failures. – Citibank appealed. Two years later the appeals court reversed the ruling 3-0 and ordered the lenders to return the money. – CEO Jane Fraser called the whole thing a "massive unforced error." One of the most powerful banks in the world sent $900 MILLION to the wrong people by accident. A federal judge ruled they could legally keep it. It took two years and millions in legal fees to get it back.
Aisar507,643 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
A software glitch sent a 911 dispatcher $1.2 MILLION instead of $82. She moved it to another account, bought a house and a car, and stopped answering the phone. The charges were eventually dropped. – Kelyn Spadoni was a 33 year old 911 dispatcher for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office in New Orleans, Louisiana. – In January 2021 she opened a brokerage account with Charles Schwab. Her first deposit was routine. Nothing unusual. – On February 23, 2021, Charles Schwab rolled out a new software enhancement to their asset transfer system. During the rollout, someone made one error. – Instead of depositing $82.56 into Spadoni's account they deposited $1,205,619. – The difference between what she was owed and what she received was $1,205,536.44. – Schwab caught the mistake almost immediately and tried to reverse the transfer. – By the time they did Spadoni had already moved the entire amount to a separate account they could not access. – She bought a house and a brand-new 2021 Hyundai Genesis and she kept moving the money to make it harder to trace. – Schwab called her to explain the error and request the funds back. She stopped answering. – The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office opened an investigation. She was arrested on April 7 2021 and charged with theft over $25,000, bank fraud, and illegal transmission of monetary funds. – She was fired from her job as a 911 dispatcher the same day she was arrested. – Schwab sued her simultaneously in federal court. Their lawyers eventually recovered approximately 75% of the money. – The Jefferson Parish District Attorney later dropped all criminal charges against her. – She kept the house. Charles Schwab made a $1.2 MILLION mistake on an $82.56 transfer. A 911 dispatcher moved the money before they could reverse it, bought a house, bought a car, and stopped answering the phone.
Aisar371,311 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce