"Now when Kane returned to Triple Double Bonus Poker, he’d find his previous $820 win was still showing. He could press the cash-out button from this screen, and the machine would re-award the jackpot. Better yet, it would re-calculate the win at the new denomination level, giving him a hand-payout of $8,200."
To me it seems analogous to placing a $1 bet on a table game, then swapping the $1 bet for a $10 bet if your wager paid out. That kind of cheating/fraud is fairly commonplace (and dealers are trained to prevent it).
That doesn't sound too different from finding and exploiting a bug in an online bank.
If e.g. someone found a way to log in as other users, that would reflect poorly on the bank's security, but it wouldn't entitle them to withdraw all the money they could access, even through "a sequence of buttons that they were legally entitled to push."
I think categorizing it as hacking makes sense in that light. The issue seems to be that the current laws treat hacking as an exotic crime with federal scope, which makes the legal cases a bit quirky.
I agree, now that I think about it. Claiming the reward is based on winning the game, but the payout is due to a bug (which the casino is not aware of) and not a win, so it is a deception (fraud).
When I was a teenager, an ATM once reported my checking account balance had a few extra thousand dollars in it. Withdrawing that money would be fraud, even though it was a computer error. Luckily I was not a stupid teenager and I left it alone. The next day it was back to the correct value.
From the article:
"Now when Kane returned to Triple Double Bonus Poker, he’d find his previous $820 win was still showing. He could press the cash-out button from this screen, and the machine would re-award the jackpot. Better yet, it would re-calculate the win at the new denomination level, giving him a hand-payout of $8,200."
To me it seems analogous to placing a $1 bet on a table game, then swapping the $1 bet for a $10 bet if your wager paid out. That kind of cheating/fraud is fairly commonplace (and dealers are trained to prevent it).