In the wake of a few different speeches by Jeremiah Grossman and Billy Hoffman on logic flaws, I thought this was pretty appropriate. I got an anonymous message today explaining how an interesting logic flaw popped up in the search engine marketing portion of Yahoo’s website. According to them, the site allows you to send them $30 for future spending with their advertising program, and in return you get $50 free SEM advertising as a promotional offer. The problem lies in the logic.
When a user signs up, the logic should state something like “if money is deposited then give a credit, if not then fail”. Unfortunately, according to them it doesn’t work that way. Regardless if your deposit is valid or not or if it fails or not, it will still credit your account $50. Whoops. I haven’t tested this or tried it, but according to them at least a few people have already been able to use this trick, and of course that’s then tied to spamming or traffic arbitraging.