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Comment by SecretDreams

6 days ago

Breaking things is fun. Effectively stealing money (the refunds) is highly illegal, immoral, and malicious. Who knows who did it, but that aspect is just dickhead territory.

I wouldn't call that stealing. It is a forced refund. A hacker could even justify it to himself that these people were unknowingly paying for a shitty product that was built like Swiss cheese, time to give them a refund. Another plausible one is "this guy shouldn't be allowed to run a website, I can't believe he made money for it, it is going back".

I am not saying it is the most likely case or even ethically justified but it is definitely not a super unlikely one. Anyone who thinks that's an impossible scenario has not been in the hacker's shoes.

  • > I wouldn't call that stealing. It is a forced refund.

    If someone took money out of your pocket would you call it stealing? What if they gave it to someone else, like a past employer or your parents or a humanitarian organization?

    By the way, you should check a dictionary. The definition of "stealing" is literally taking something away without permission.

    • Being in the possession of a password or key implies having permission to use that key. When generating a key you give everyone with access to that key the permission to use it to perform actions on your account.

      Protect your keys.

      8 replies →

  • Refund or chargeback? The processing fees for a chargeback on every transaction could put him out of business.

    He's lucky they didn't find a way to use it for card washing.

    • It would have had to be refund. The hacker could t initiate a chargeback from knowing the merchant's stripe keys. Seriously doubt it was a competitor. The risks of hiring someone to commit felons against your competitors just isn't worth it. Especially since the vibe coder seems to be bungling things on their own just fine.

    • How about you pay more attention to the story? It's not Visa/MasterCard or the customers that got hacked.

  • > I wouldn't call that stealing. It is a forced refund.

    Respectfully, what the hell are you talking about?

    Imagine you work 40 hours making an app and I pay you for those 40 hours. A third party comes in and says, I'm forcing a refund here - you lose the money you made, but you get the app you made.

    How do you feel about this forced refund?

  • >I wouldn't call that stealing. It is a forced refund.

    Can you name an instance of stealing that could not be described as a forced refund?