The Art of Exploiting vs the Bad Habit of Scamming

[kire - cryptzino]

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Another scenario, which would only work in smaller markets/sports though:

You have a flagged and heavily limited account in a bookmaker. Early odds come out, player A vs player B, 1.80 - 2.00. You want to bet on player B, but with higher odds. So with your flagged account you bet on player A multiple times max stake (because of the limit, you can't stake a lot though). Odds move of course, and are maybe 1.60 - 2.40 then. That is when a friend of you with unflagged/unlimited account places max bet on that 2.40.

Into what kind of category would that fall ? Exploit ? Scam ? Market manipulation ?

Bookies are not balancing their books like that.

E.g., You cannot move the odds so easily, especially with a limited account and small bets.

Most of the flagged and heavily limited accounts have limits of 1$/€, max 5$/€.

If you want to pick a tendency, you could try NBA/NHL games where odds are usually moving in one direction for hours and green it in an exchange.

IF you want to watch a roller coaster - check the horses

BTW I would appreciate your opinion here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5261890.0

Thanks

[tyKiwanuka]

Bookies are not balancing their books like that.

E.g., You cannot move the odds so easily, especially with a limited account and small bets.

You can I am talking about niche markets here and early odds. I experienced it myself, without doing anything bad. It was just a super value bet (in my eyes), so I placed max bet multiple times in a short period of time and after each bet, the odds went down automatically.

The bookmakers use flagged accounts all the time to help them shape their (early) odds, before they up the general limit. Same reason why SBO changed their policy/limits some time ago, they get cheap information from the sharps that way. But you can't put the limits too low or they are not interested anymore. So your $1-$5 limit is somewhat correct, but the very good books limit their best players just to the point, where they will still stick around. They are very valuable to them.

[Steamtyme]

1) Lets start with a simple example, a football match, which is offered by every bookmaker you can imagine. There is breaking news, that team A will miss a lot of their players due to a flu. Odds are dropping like crazy in all bookmakers, but there is one bookmaker that is slow and has bad software.

I don't see anything wrong here. This is more of a level of service issue than anything. Especially so if they are consistently lagging in updating, this would be a glaring issue they would have to blatantly ignore. There could be any number of reasons for it, and would be something I expect them as a business operator to rectify and/or adapt to. I say that s this would be glaringly obvious to them, and not some random secret issue that could go unnoticed.

2) By accident you discover that a bookmaker allows to parlay 1X2 and Asian Handicap market, which is of course a software issue. So you could parlay home win with AHC -0.5 for all kind of matches, which will give you good value odds. Is it ok to parlay these two dependant bets ?

I don't wager often, so I don't get the logistics behind this. My take is that you run it once, make sure there is an exploit and prove it. You then contact their team and explain and prove it to them. Beyond that you are taking a hidden exploit and turning it into a scam. Not many people would be able to take advantage of it and if you attempt to be stealthy this could carry on for a long term.

3) Is it ok to take advantage of this software issue in general ? For $20 ? For $500k ? (Leave aside the fact, that LAngel played with "cheated" money).

No. I place this in the same category as #2. Try it prove it and then contact support to make them aware of it. If you go beyond that and attempt to game it for yourself you are knowingly attempting to turn an exploit into a scam.

4) Lets say I have a trading bot (in betting or crypto exchange) and this bot goes wild due to misprogramming and I lose loads of money. Are all these users filling my orders scammers, when it's obvious that these prices are wrong ?

In trading that would be on you, you are trusting your software to make decisions for you. No one is tricking it with a series of commands or events to make it do something outside of designed operation.

I feel the moment you discover something that is hidden and use this to manipulate the odds in your favor you are acting unethically and in bad faith. It crosses some lines and I would expect casinos and bookmakers to refuse service to individuals who abuse these hidden exploits without reporting them.

You have a flagged and heavily limited account in a bookmaker. Early odds come out, player A vs player B, 1.80 - 2.00. You want to bet on player B, but with higher odds. So with your flagged account you bet on player A multiple times max stake (because of the limit, you can't stake a lot though). Odds move of course, and are maybe 1.60 - 2.40 then. That is when a friend of you with unflagged/unlimited account places max bet on that 2.40.
Into what kind of category would that fall ? Exploit ? Scam ? Market manipulation ?

This depends. Are you taking a share of your friends profits. If so I feel this is 2 individuals manipulating and attempting to scam a bookmaker. If your friend happened to place a bet after you mentioned something along the lines of wishing you had been able to get those odds, then that's them using information for their own gain - not having participated in getting the odds manipulated.

Personally if they aren't offering the odds you want and can't find them elsewhere the spot doesn't exist. Fabricating it through betting and exploiting that using a different account makes this unethical imo. It's really no differnt than you just having an alt account to circumvent their TOS.

[Upgrade00]

Into what kind of category would that fall ? Exploit ? Scam ? Market manipulation ?

Sounds so much like a pump and dump scheme.
There was intent in this case to move the odds in their favour assuming both individuals were working together. It would count as market manipulation to me. An exploit would be taking advantage of an existing flaw. A scam would be to use dubious and sometimes criminal means to cheat a system.
Bookies can protect themselves with their ToS in different situations, and they make it as wide as possible to leave then enough wiggle room, so players can as well push the very limits to swing the odds to their favour. When both parties get too close to the edges, it could be outrightly unethical, but isn't a scam imo.

There is however a thin line between, scamming and manipulating and there would be diverse opinions on this.

[SyGambler]

a nice discussion really
overall I don't count odds delay as an abuse but I try to avoid them as much as I can just because most likely my account will be super limited by taking such bets
at the end all sportsbetting sites have rules and they can void the bets whenever they want so sometimes books can be  unfair with their customers as well
also if we count this as an abuse then arbitrage may be considered the same as well , for me both are fine and as I said the books can always use their void sword so bettors aren't breaking any rules

the 2nd and 3rd ones are abuses and should be reported , never seen the 2nd one happening tho

the trading one is normal , the other traders aren't responsible for others' mistakes and they may be using bots as well
overall I can't see how this can happen , even if you put small orders the exchange should be matching you with the highest buy orders
unless you are doing it with a small coin and that can be explained as a try to dump the market and get rid of that coin

[serjent05]

• But if I counted it, kept the money and attempted several other times to cheat the machine, this should be outrightly fraudulent as I'm taking advantage of an obvious glitch repeatedly with intent to cheat. A scam.

It is an exploit not a scam since it is a glitch/error of the machine.  It has been defined clearly from the posts before yours how scam and exploit are different. You can refer to Lakai01 since he clearly differentiates the two.

There was intent in this case to move the odds in their favour assuming both individuals were working together. It would count as market manipulation to me. An exploit would be taking advantage of an existing flaw. A scam would be to use dubious and sometimes criminal means to cheat a system.

when a system is involved, it is always portrayed as an exploit.  Cheating a system is not scamming but rather exploiting the flaw to one's owns advantage.

There is however a thin line between, scamming and manipulating and there would be diverse opinions on this.

The thin line between an exploit and scam is this explained well here

So with exploits I am dependent on someone else having made a mistake which I can now exploit. However, you had absolutely no influence on the fact that the error is also built in. This is different with a scam attack, where I try to get my victim to make a mistake, so I deliberately deceive him.

[Upgrade00]

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You should read the contents of my reply. I never said it was a scam but manipulation. An exploit would be finding a glitch, but when you create it yourself it's manipulation, imo at least.
I was sharing similar ideas as the reply you linked, but with different words;

There was intent in this case to move the odds in their favour assuming both individuals were working together. It would count as market manipulation to me. An exploit would be taking advantage of an existing flaw. A scam would be to use dubious and sometimes criminal means to cheat a system.

[Lakai01]

the trading one is normal , the other traders aren't responsible for others' mistakes and they may be using bots as well
overall I can't see how this can happen , even if you put small orders the exchange should be matching you with the highest buy orders
unless you are doing it with a small coin and that can be explained as a try to dump the market and get rid of that coin

There are already scenarios where this could happen.
Many of the bots are self-developed and adapted to best suit the trading behavior of the bot-owner.

A simple bug that could lead to the loss of a lot of money would be, for example, a comma error. In German-speaking countries, for example, 10k is written like this:

10.000,00

In English-speaking countries in particular, however, the exact opposite is true:

10,000.00

If you as a developer make a mistake and you place a sell order for 1 BTC for 10 dollars instead of 10k dollars, this is a rather painful loss. In the early days of the Exchanges you have seen something like this in the order books from time to time, e.g. on bitcoin.de, where coins were set at 10% of the market price - and the orders were of course filled immediately

But I'm with you on this: It's definitely no "offence" of the buyer if someone places such a sell order.

[tyKiwanuka]

4) Lets say I have a trading bot (in betting or crypto exchange) and this bot goes wild due to misprogramming and I lose loads of money. Are all these users filling my orders scammers, when it's obvious that these prices are wrong ?

In trading that would be on you, you are trusting your software to make decisions for you. No one is tricking it with a series of commands or events to make it do something outside of designed operation.

I agree with that of course

But lets look at it from the the other side. You see a 10 BTC sell order in a self-regulated exchange for $100 per BTC and you buy them. Would you feel good about it ? Would you consider this behaviour ethical ? If you don't buy them, then another user will buy them. Would you hesitate to buy them to not have any compunction ?

Does it make any difference, if you actively buy them or just had a order in the market that mysteriously got filled ?

the 2nd and 3rd ones are abuses and should be reported , never seen the 2nd one happening tho

I never saw it for 1X2 and AHC too, but there was for example a bookmaker in the past, where in Formula 1 you could parlay odds for winner & Top3 market. When I told them, they never got back to me and didn't even fix it.

[SyGambler]

I never saw it for 1X2 and AHC too, but there was for example a bookmaker in the past, where in Formula 1 you could parlay odds for winner & Top3 market. When I told them, they never got back to me and didn't even fix it.

Well you did your part then and they are just careless
this has happened with me in another site where I reported a feature that can make players have frequent +EV bets , they said they will study it and get back to me
well they never replied back but they changed their ToS and made it that they have the right to cancel that feature for bettors whenever they want 

[serjent05]

But lets look at it from the the other side. You see a 10 BTC sell order in a self-regulated exchange for $100 per BTC and you buy them. Would you feel good about it ? Would you consider this behaviour ethical ? If you don't buy them, then another user will buy them. Would you hesitate to buy them to not have any compunction ?

If it was me, I would feel good because I got a huge discount and I don't see any wrong on that action. In the sense of being ethical, I believe it is because the buyer bought it legally.  This case is almost the same as seeing money on the street and picking it up not knowing who lost it.  The only difference is that we know that the seller intends to sell that BTC, whether there is a price error or not is out of my concern, I do not forced or trick him to sell at such low price so why would I feel that I wronged him.

Does it make any difference, if you actively buy them or just had a order in the market that mysteriously got filled ?

It does in a sense of awareness. 

[hatshepsut93]

4) Lets say I have a trading bot (in betting or crypto exchange) and this bot goes wild due to misprogramming and I lose loads of money. Are all these users filling my orders scammers, when it's obvious that these prices are wrong ?

When you trade on an exchange, the orders might be placed long before they get executed, so in your scenario of bot malfunction, it's more like you are mistakenly fulfilling someone's orders, rather than the vice versa, so it's not a scam.

As for exploiting and scamming, strictly speaking, scamming is using persuasion to trick humans, while exploiting is using flaws of the software to steal something. They are both bad, obviously. Sometimes people passively benefit from software flaws, like receiving double orders for the price of one - in that case a honest person should notify their counterparty about their mistake.

[Lakai01]

But lets look at it from the the other side. You see a 10 BTC sell order in a self-regulated exchange for $100 per BTC and you buy them. Would you feel good about it ? Would you consider this behaviour ethical ? If you don't buy them, then another user will buy them. Would you hesitate to buy them to not have any compunction ?

Does it make any difference, if you actively buy them or just had a order in the market that mysteriously got filled ?

I personally would hesitate so long (because I just couldn't believe it) until the order is fulfilled by someone else who would be less worried about whether all this is true

But I see the subtle difference just like you do. Actively fulfilling the order and taking advantage of someone's "mistake" is much harder than having the order filled automatically by a bot, for example. The latter would make me happy, the former I would most likely just not do.

[Kakmakr]

I think where the situation got a little muddy with  LAngel and Bitcasino was that he did not cheat Bitcasino.io... but rather cheated on another site where he exploited a weak point and then he used that money to gamble at Bitcasino.io

So it makes this case a bit more complex, because the question is... Can they void your winnings, if you did not exploit a bug on the casino where you won the jackpot, but you used money to bet on that casino that you exploited on another gambling site.

I think legally you stand no chance in court to justify your case, if you used any money that was gained illegally through any means. Whatever gives you a unfair advantage over the "house" and other players, should be deemed illegal.    (Bots are mostly based on skill, like they are doing on that "Seuntjies" site, so if your skill in bots are superior and it is allowed on the site, then I do not think it is wrong.)  

[tyKiwanuka]

Sometimes people passively benefit from software flaws, like receiving double orders for the price of one - in that case a honest person should notify their counterparty about their mistake.

Here you could have different layers/scenarios again. Lets assume this is just a one-time glitch and not something you can exploit again.

If your order was for $5 and through this glitch you got $5 on top. Would you want to give the money back no matter what ? I think most people would take the extra $5 and move on. Now if you got $100k plus $100k, this is a different ball game. There is an individual threshold with being "honest" and the higher the amount, the more likely you will be honest imo.

The latter would make me happy, the former I would most likely just not do.

I think 99,99% would take the 10 BTC. You see the opportunity and grab it in the heat of the moment, without thinking too much, this is just normal human behaviour (when you know someone else would do it, if you don't do it). And it's anonymous. The interesting thing is what happens afterwards - I guess the overwhelming majority would feel guilty and even try to somehow give the money/BTC back to the rightful owner. I could even imagine a scenario, where you put the BTC up again for $100 and let someone else deal with those feelings

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Some years ago there was a Youtuber, who made some tutorial about a wallet installation or whatever. He had a good stack and was cautious, as you should be, by blurrying his private keys for the video. But when he minimized a window, his private keys were visible for the split of a second. One viewer wrote down the keys, imported them into his wallet and send the funds away. Not for stealing them, but to protect them and give them back to the Youtuber. Very proactive, noble and honest

[hatshepsut93]

If your order was for $5 and through this glitch you got $5 on top. Would you want to give the money back no matter what ? I think most people would take the extra $5 and move on. Now if you got $100k plus $100k, this is a different ball game. There is an individual threshold with being "honest" and the higher the amount, the more likely you will be honest imo.

It's true that the size of mistake plays a large role, and people know that often times when a mistake is small, the company might not even respond to them, so it's not worth the effort to notify them. But with smaller business, it can be really important to disclose such incidents, because these mistakes might be vulnerabilities that can cause serious damage to them. And in our case, I think all crypto casinos are still rather small, and since some of them have public bankrolls, it's better to not ignore such things if you encounter them.

[Steamtyme]

But lets look at it from the the other side. You see a 10 BTC sell order in a self-regulated exchange for $100 per BTC and you buy them. Would you feel good about it ? Would you consider this behaviour ethical ? If you don't buy them, then another user will buy them. Would you hesitate to buy them to not have any compunction ?
Does it make any difference, if you actively buy them or just had a order in the market that mysteriously got filled ?

Well i can't imagine a scenario when that would be possible. Might be because I don't trade or know what happens if someone places an order insanely lower than the market price.

All things being equal and I'm first to have the chance. Here is how I'd go about it. I'd buy them, and would feel good about it. Not because I got a deal, but because my first reaction is going to be to contact the exchange support stating I think there was an error, and ask them to contact the seller. This is why I would buy them because I know how I would proceed, and don't have enough faith in the rest of humanity to do the same.

If nothing comes of it and support either doesn't hear back or at all from the seller then great for me, if not then they get their coins and I take my $1000 back. I try to operate in the digital arena the same as I would irl, and this reminds me of someone clearing out their kids stuff and having some random valuable that they have no idea it's actual worth. Some businesses will work out a fair market price, others will low ball it and then reap the rewards.

Again not knowing the intricacies of placing orders for trades, and how I would get an order filled that far below market while others would be passed over; it's hard to comment on. I feel it would be a similar situation for me though. I would check in to see if there was an error and sort it out in a manner that seems fair.

I get why some may think it's okay to do things another way and grab a 100K score off someones error, but that's not me. I'd love to have a score like that but not by directly taking it out of the pockets of someone else.

[deisik]

4) Lets say I have a trading bot (in betting or crypto exchange) and this bot goes wild due to misprogramming and I lose loads of money. Are all these users filling my orders scammers, when it's obvious that these prices are wrong ?

This seems to be a good place to start out (you should have probably made it #1 item in the list)

It is obvious that traders filling your orders are unaware of the fact that your bot went nuts. Moreover, they themselves may be using bots. In this way, you can't call them scammers or cheaters. And even if it looks like something went totally wrong on your side, there is no certainty of that. To sum it up, in trading the answer is pretty straightforward. You cannot call scammers those people who are filling your allegedly wrong orders as there's no knowing

Indeed, it is more complicated with casinos as little doubt arises when something is totally off, e.g. when you start winning all of a sudden and that is definitely not due to a streak of luck. With that in mind, there are two major choices to be made. If you consider the casino in point as a legit and honest one, then exploiting the bug will be cheating (I don't think scamming is an appropriate term here). However, if they are themselves scammers (e.g. refuse to pay out jackpots or anything to that effect), then cheating on them can be morally justified (as I see it)

[tyKiwanuka]

However, if they are themselves scammers (e.g. refuse to pay out jackpots or anything to that effect), then cheating on them can be morally justified (as I see it)

Yep, something I had in my mind for discussion too at a later point. Like does scamming a scammer make you a scammer yourself ? From the general answers so far in this thread, I would assume that most users would be ok with doing it and you are no scammer per se, more like a modern Robin Hood maybe. But then again, a lot of users showed high moral standards (which is good) and even scamming a scammer is not easy to square with your conscience. You either have it kind of in your DNA or not imo and feel bad for doing it yourself, no matter the circumstances. Technically it will be hard anyway, since they are pro with scamming most of the times and you are not.   

[Lakai01]

Technically it will be hard anyway, since they are pro with scamming most of the times and you are not.  

I honestly wouldn't be so sure. Most of the scamers don't work alone but in a group, where they get orders from their bosses including scripts, what to say/write in which situation and they just play the scripts. There was a documentary about it on german television, I can link to it if you are interested.

There are also a lot of "Scam the scammer" videos on Youtube and co. where exactly such cases are shown, where the scammers themselves were tricked:



Source: Google Search

Some of them are really funny to watch, but some also leave you sad when you realize that the scamers only do this because they were ordered to do so ...