Topic: The Art of Exploiting vs the Bad Habit of Scamming - page 3. (Read 743 times)

I would consider every situation as an exploit instead of scamming, that is, if the faulty software was found and was intentionally taken advantage of, just like how LAngel did from your quote did. I consider Exploiting and scamming as two sides of a coin tbh. Let's say A is the creator and B is the user, Exploit is when B takes advantage of whatever mistakes A made, intentionally. Scamming, on the other hand, could be said to be A taking advantage of B. Some examples could include making fake sites and taking advantage of the ignorance of B, they scam their money.

They both are basically the same in the essence of taking advantage of others, but the medium behind that advantage is different. Exploits take advantage of "mistakes" while scamming takes advantage of "ignorance". You can argue that mistakes and ignorance are the same, but ignorance only becomes a mistake once you know about it. If you were ignorant beforehand, it isn't a mistake, but rather ignorance.

Still, Scenarios may vary based on the situation by situation, just like what @20kevin20, it isn't wrong to call it subjective. Most often than not, those that lost something are the ones considered as "victims" and those that got something out of it are considered as the "bad guys", but there are cases that are not as such. What if both ignorance and mistake were filled in both of their cases? A made a "mistake" and B was "ignorant" of the mistake of A, who's at fault? The matter of ignorance is purely subjective though, so it may come off as B probably lying, but who the hell can tell us that right?

Indeed it is a very subjective thing since this scenario cannot be called a scam.  It is under the boundary of exploitation. Since one of the definitions of scam is taking advantage of trust or ignorance of a person and steal from them for personal gain^[1].  I do not see any trust issue in this scenario.   

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[1] https://support.gamigo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204183367-ArcheAge-Scamming-And-Exploiting

I am surprised by this answer, since I find this at the very least immoral. The difference between 2) and 3) is not that big on paper imo, and for 3) you clearly say "scam". You said:


....but if you can parlay 1X2 and AHC, I don't think you can assume "misknowledge or else" and thus it must be software issue (by human error, i.e. this being allowed to be parley'd). If it's really misknowledge, then that bookie should look for new personnel maybe Probably this is a bit apples and oranges with slots/betting though (?). Or I am not familiar enough with slots.

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If a bookie cancels a 2.00, when it's 1.80-ish everywhere else after a drop, then it's the bookie scamming imo. As you say, it's their fault and they should just take it on the chin and try to improve. I had information advantage and they can't punish me for that.
Even the 2.00 (that goes down to 1.40 in other places), I wouldn't expect to get cancelled, unless you put huge amounts on it. Did you experience these bets getting cancelled regularly ?

No. I will skip.

It's borderline. Bookie being slow is not my fault. Yet, the bookie will then cancel the bet anyway.




I would take it.

I'm betting on an outcome on the odds given by the bookie.





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).[/quote]

I love exploiting everything 'within the conditions'.
If the conditions are set in my favor due misknowledge or else, it's not my problem.

Here we are talking about crossing the line and doing a pure scam.

I will pass 100%.




(note: talking about self-regulated markets like EtherDelta, Betfair, etc.)

I'm using bots (self-coded) for 90%+ of my bets and trading.

I have been on both sides - losing 3x10ETH in a matter of minutes because of my coding errors and placing orders on obsolete contracts, through many other errors, to bot explicitly made to catch errors in the market.

Nope, they are not scammers.

The market is not there to guard you. The market is there for opportunities - on both sides.

If X doesn't fill it, Y will - the (self-regulated) market is never forgiving in these situations. Both X or Y could be just better-programmed bots, not people trying to 'steal' from you.
 

There have been instances where people have missed/misplaced a zero (or multiple zeros) and got wrecked because of it, so it's not necessarily something to happen only in naked markets.

I don't think you can blame someone for exploiting/scamming you because you have missed a zero though. That's like buying a lambo or a house from someone for 10x cheaper and being blamed for exploiting/scamming that person. You listed the coin, I wanted it. What should I be blamed for?

There's a quite big difference between purchasing something cheaper than it was supposed to be and finding a website bug/glitch & using it to take money that isn't yours out of a website.

Good post @20kevin20.


It definitely is, thats why it's interesting to hear different opinions while I am myself are still struggling with this topic. I didn't completely make my mind up yet regarding this matter.

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I don't think I agree with this. ETH is probably a bad example, since even when you click the sell button for $25, you will get matched higher, unless you have gazillions of ETH and can bring the price down to $25 with it.
But lets assume there is a "naked" market in an exchange for ETH. The price everywhere else is $250 and my bot puts up ETH to sell for $25 in this naked market, because I missed a zero there maybe. Would you buy them ? According to first quote, you are exploiting/scamming (me), since you "consciously take advantage" of an obvious mistake - whether it's software based or manual misclick doesn't matter here imo. According to second quote, it's my fault and ok to buy them.

In both cases there is a software issue, but different entities.

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You can for example bet on a home win in football in different manners. You can play the "1" for home win or AHC -0.5 - both are the same. If odds are 2.00 for both and you are able to parlay them, you will get 2.00 x 2.00 = 4.00 odds.

It's a very subjective thing.

In my opinion, this is not a scam nor can it necessarily be called exploiting unless you know it's a software issue and are intentionally using it to your own advantage instead of contacting the casino about it. I don't think it'd be right for me to call you a criminal for doing something you had no idea of.

If Amazon lists a $1k item for $10 by mistake, it's not my fault for ordering it. In fact, Amazon has had such glitches before and admitted it was their mistake, proceeding with the delivery of the very cheap items. So in this case, it is the casino's fault.

I believe this is exploiting, although I am not 100% sure what this scenario is about.

No. Consciously taking advantage of a software issue is exploiting and scamming at the same time.


It's your fault. The buyers have no idea whether you wanted to sell your funds cheap or not and it's not their fault that you have misprogrammed that thing. Take it from another perspective: You go to an exchange and accidentally sell your ETH at $25 instead of $250. You clicked that Sell button yourself - is it your fault or is it those who bought your ETH so cheap to blame?

An exploit begins when you consciously take advantage of something at one point and the scam begins when that "something" starts turning into a loss from your actions. Example: say Facebook has a limit of liking 100 posts per hour. You somehow manage to get unlimited likes and like 10k for 10 hours straight.

Facebook's servers are very strong and could handle your actions, but what if you find a glitch in a casino and can withdraw as much money as you want from it without having to deposit, so you take advantage of it and start withdrawing thousands of USD that isn't yours? The casino will start losing money because of you. That's scamming.

I guess everyone is aware of the Bitcasino incident, which was also discussed afterwards in this thread. This is a topic that I thought about a lot in the past and which is super interesting, with even philosophical tendencies. And I guess it's a hot topic, with lots of different opinions and emotions.

I will stick with exploiting vs scamming here to make it easier. There is probably a fine line between these two phrases, but there is also exploiting and exploiting, scamming and scamming.

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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. While all bookmakers only offer 1.40-ish for team B anymore, that bookmaker still has the initial 2.00 for them. Is it ok to bet on this 2.00 ? What if a bookmaker is constantly slow with adjusting odds and you could regularly do it ? Not for 2.00 -> 1.40, but maybe 2.00 -> 1.80.

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 ?

3) This is the quote from user LAngel from that thread above (can't quote properly, because thread is locked)


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).

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 ?

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What of the above is an exploit and what is a scam ? Where does an exploit start and a scam begin ? Are you clever or a cheater when doing this ? Is it more ok to do it for $10 than for $10,000 or $1.5mln like LAngel did ? Is it more ok to do it with a supposedly rich casino/bookmaker ?

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And what about fixed matches ? These matches do exist, every day there is match fixing, but most of the time we gladly don't know or aren't aware. If you (get to) know about a fixed match and bet on it, does that make you a scammer/cheater ?

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Gambling is a (most of the time unfair) competition in the end. Should the "software factor" be completely called immoral and unethical behaviour, when you take advantage of it ? If there is a line for you, where is it ?

There is way more to this discussion imo, but I will leave this as a start and we can work out more as this thread evolves (hopefully).

I made this thread self-moderated, because these kind of threads unfortunately get spammy very fast, with a lot of users just repeating things over and over.