Interesting, but definitly not surprising. When I was younger I found a way to hack a poorly designed online quizz, tied to a very famous french radio quizz. It was pay per play, with a 1000 euros weekly winner (400 euros for the second, 100 for the third).

The hack will make you laugh : right click on the flash app, select "Stop", and enjoy unlimited time to answer the questions instead of the 10 secs countdown. Then, when I was ready to submit the answer, I'd change my Windows clock time back in time since you'd have to be the fatest player as well.

But the interesting part is how I started playing this quizz. One night, very very late, I bumped into the site and I decided to try the practice mode, wich was free. I started the quizz, and I had a surprise when I discovered that a small white asterix showed next to the right answer every time. I thought that it was dumb even if it was the practice mode and I suspected something wierd was going on, so I immediatly started a real paying game to verify my suspicions. Again, a white asterisk would sit next to the right answer.

You'd have to answer 5 grids of 10 questions successfuly to make the best score, then the winner would be the overall best time. I managed to finish the 1st grid, then in the middle of the second one, the white asterisks suddenly disappeared. This is when I understood what happened : the admin was probably cheating the game, and he made a mistake wich made the asterisks visible by everyone instead of himself only.

Still, the game was under French juridiction and supposely enforced by an "Huisser", like every other game in France. My bet is that the huissier didn't understood jack about computers and didn't care at all about this internet quizz.

I talked about this quizz to my best friend and we quickly discovered the exploits. We figured out that if we set the Windows clock back in time before I even started to answer the question, the final time per question would be a couple of hundreds milliseconds, varying from 50-300.

So I decided I would take my chance against the admin and try to win the 1000 euros, wich was plenty of money for a teenager. It was still a lot of work because most of the questions were insanely difficult and even with Google it was often hard to find the answer. As a matter of fact, the quizz was plain impossible to answer for a human.

Nevermind, with a lot of patience and a couple of days, I managed to answer the 5 grids with an amazing final time, I figured out that if the admin was cheating, then he couldn't say anything. The game would automatically ends at midnight every Sunday and declares the winner. I did the last grid on Sunday evening so that I wouldn't appear in the high scores too early and the admin wouldn't suspect anything.

I watched anxiously the table of scores and as midnight approached I started to relax, nothing unusual happened. Then suddenly, at 23:45, 15 mins before the game would end, a player appeared out of nowhere in the scores and was quickly climbing the ladder. I knew it was him.

When he finaly ended his fifth grid, he reached the top scores, but only took the second position because I had a best overall time, so my plan worked perfectly as I knew he wasn't prepared for this. A couple of seconds later, the game ended and I was declared winner. I was given a phone number I had to call to claim my reward.

On the next day, I dialed up the number. When he picked up, you could almost hear the spider webs being removed from the phone :

- "Hello ?"

- "Hi, I won the game yesterday, and I was given this number to call."

- "Ohhhh, it's you", his tone was priceless. You could guess I was the first person ever claiming the reward. At this moment, I knew he knew and he knew I knew. He asked for my details and told me I would receive the check soon.

I tuned up to the radio show in the afternoon, and waited for my minute of glory. "And congratulations to our internet winner of the week, , living in , for winning the 1000 euros". Good.

A couple of days later, I received my 1000 euros check and I went to see the updated list of winners on the site. Unsurprisingly, I was the only one listed with a real name instead of a nickname and an actual town showing in the details.

The following week, I decided I would beat the admin again, for my best friend this time. I tweaked my tactic a bit so I would valid the last grid in the last minutes. It wasn't as easy as it sounded since the pages had an expiration time, but I figured it out.

This time, the admin figured out he should make a better score and his final score was much better than the last week. Still, I had predicted it and when I valided my last grid with a nearly perfect overall time (50 questions in about 20 secs), it was too late for him and I won again.

My friend called and he received his check. The rules wouldn't allow us to participate again before 6 months, but I knew there was a time to stop, and we decided to never participate again. Moreover, I had beaten the admin twice and that was my main satisfaction, and I knew I had played all my cards and beating him again would be very difficult if not impossible.

The third week, I went to check the winner and his overall time was indeed ridiculous. It was clear the admin was unbeatable from now. Well, in one sense only, because a couple of weeks later, the winner prize turned from the 1000 euros to a ticket to participate in the actual radio show. I laughed hard, because I knew I forced the admin to make unbelievable times and they figured out he was cheating. I don't know if he was fired, but he certainly didn't have a 4000 euros monthly bonus anymore.

Since this time, I have a different look on this kind of games, especially when there is an admin behind. Moral of the story : Poker is no exception, and if you cannot fully trust the admin, even with the best legislation, you cannot trust the game either.