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How to rip off your local bookstore monopoly
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                                    2001 diabolik
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disclaimer : I wrote this to bring to light a rather glaring hole.  I wrote it in
a howto-ish sort of form to display how the system could possibly be abused, not with
the intent that the actions below would ever be enacted.  Do not do this.  It is
most likely fraud, and more importantly, morally wrong.  Upon acting out these steps,
you take full responsibility for your actions and release me, diabolik, from any
responsibility.  Yeah.

So.  Indigo owns Chapters.  Chapters owns Coles.  Until later 2002 when Barnes&Noble
cross the border, nearly every major bookstore in Canada is owned by the same company.  Not
cool.

Wait, it really is actually.  Once Indigo bought Chapters, Heather Reisman decided to 
amalgamate a bunch of things.  Firstly, the annoying discount card program is now the
same at chapters, coles, indigo, etc.. irewards program.

So what.  Save 10% off of regular priced books.  Yeah.

Now, Chapters and Coles, and presumably Indigo, have a very jolly Canadian return policy.
Bring back an undamaged book without a receipt and exchange the book or get gift 
certificates back.  You can probably see where this is going.  Make a $100 purchase with
a iRewards card (pay $90) at Coles.  Bring the books back to Chapters and get $100 in 
gift certificates.  Make a $111 purchase ($100/0.9) at chapters (or coles), paying $100,
and bring the books back to either place and receive the full $111, which buys you $123 
worth of books.

You don't need both a Coles and a Chapters, but it helps - the more entities you can
return the books, the less times you have to frequent either.  And you can be funny
about it - buy all the copies of a certain book from Chapters and return them all to
Coles (they'll catch on to this, the SIMS computer system at Coles will show a return
of larger quantity than ever ordered, however that won't be noticed until days later.
I'm not sure if Chapters' tills would notice the erroneous return sooner - however, just
buy common books so that you're not the only sales of the title and therefore won't cause
panic in the bookgeeks.  Be warned - Coles usually only employs around 10 people in their
mall stores, and these people do have the mental capacity to remember people.  It would
be suggested to do this ploy with multiple people, so that its less obvious.  Use New
Release hardcover titles - about $50 apeice and are popular enough.  I'd suggest use
audio cassetes but you wouldn't save 10% so it'd be useless.

NOTE - register your iRewards card with fake info - they keep that in a main database and
if they somehow correlated these returns without receipts with your purchases you would
be in trouble.

So, You've done this 7 times and doubled your money.  You still have only gift
certificates, not real dough.  You can get the money out of this by -

 - buying books for people who were otherwise going to pay for them anyways.  You don't
have to tell them your plan, you could just tell them granny gave you gift certificates
and you wanna get rid of them.  However, this still forces you to involve more people.

 - when you order a book from Chapters, you have to often prepay for the book if its
a rare title.  If this book cannot be ordered, you can go back and receive money for 
the title because the computer doesn't keep track of if the book was prepaid with
gift certificates or not.

fuck corporations, eh?

diabolik
http://th.oughtpolice.net

greetz - clox, hackcanada, nettwerked, heather herself, roy fans.

flames - tron - stop killing me in LORD you bitch