Jonathan Stark’s Starbucks card gets hacked

August 12, 2011 By Mike Dunn

Jonathon Stark's Starbucks card gets hacked and over $625 was stolen. The hacker said that he will donate the money from the theft to charity.

Earlier this week we introduced you to Jonathan Stark, who was testing out a social experiment. Today a hacker outlined exactly how he started to steal money from the card and transfer the balance to his own Starbucks card. The hacker goes by the name of Odio, who has decided to sell the loaded Starbucks card on Ebay and give the proceeds to the charity Save the Children.

The experiment started with Stark taking a picture of the back of his Starbucks card so that he could use his card on both his iPhone and Android phone. Once he did that he thought maybe other people would like to use it, and see how people would react to the possibility of getting a free cup of coffee. Stark put $100 of his own money on the card, and told people how to reload the card if they wanted to but it was never required.

His story hit the media and there was a some doubt about the real goal behind the experiment. Some people accused Starbucks of setting the whole thing up as a viral advertising stunt. Stark cleared up the confusion and stated that the motive behind the experiment were pure.

Odio figured out a way to transfer money from Stark’s card to his own. He then set up a reminder that would alert him when the balance on Stark’s card reached a certain amount, at which time he would empty out the account. In no time Odio was able to transfer $625 from Stark’s card.

Stark’s card and the iPhone camper are two interesting social experiments to surface this week. Let’s hope that the man camping out for over a month for an iPhone doesn’t get robbed like Jonathan Stark.

Showing 3 comments

Stewart at 9:16am 13th August 2011 Actually, when he started this, it was a free coffee experiment, He loaded some money, not $100 at first, and wanted to see if a few people would just buy a coffee, or if someone would just wipe it out. He had no idea that the card could be loaded anonymously and did not come up with the idea of take a penny, give a penny or pay it forward. He quickly changed the tone and marketing of it though as if it was his idea and intention all along.I understand that some good came of it and he should be proud of the positive side affects of what he started, whether it was his intention or not. But, he has been aware of the scamming for quite some time, and continued to promote the good without warning of the bad. His twitter feed could easily have shown balance transfers and called the scammers out on it.If Johnathan was really an honest and nice guy, he would have stopped it when he knew people were buying ipads with the money people were donating with good intentions. He would let everyone know how many free coffees he earned through the my rewards program, and donate them. His $100 investment in pay it forward has people all over the world paying for his coffees for more than the next year from the free drinks earned in the rewards program. He would look at transaction history and report exactly how much was scammed from balance transfers. The reason he kept going after knowing it was being abused is likely why Starbucks shut it down without hesitation.Oh, and calling Odin a hacker is giving him to much credit. He is a thief. $500 is the maximum you can have on a Starbucks card, so he has already used at least $125 for himself. Starbucks should cancel his card, and any card used for balance transfers from Jonathans card, and ebay should pull the auction. There is no way he is donating more than 5x what he stole.
swag at 7:20pm 12th August 2011 Starbucks has punk'd the public with planted stories like this for years. So no, he did not clear up the confusion. He just added a smokescreen. Particularly when Stark removed all references to Starbucks on his company web site when the story broke.
1. Mike Dunn at 9:18pm 12th August 2011 The explanation that the company gave made sense to me. The company had never worked with Starbucks, nor had Stark and the page was removed a long time before the story broke.