How To Hack A Candy Machine With No Money

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Accessing the Munchie Mainframe

Why the foolish idea of hacking vending machines remains and so highly-seasoned.

Photo analogy by Slate. Photos by Thinkstock.

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For proof that a heist needn't involve jewels, paintings, or bank vaults to authorize among history's greatest, await no further than the CIA contractors who hacked into agency vending machines and stole $3,314.40 worth of snacks over a period in 2012 and 2013. When their handiwork was revealed last year in a declassified report, the contractors were hailed every bit folk heroes, in no pocket-sized role considering they did something we've all, in our eye of hearts, dreamed of doing: They scammed their way into a regular supply of free snacks, and for a piffling while, they got away with it.

I have a theory that most people take a kind of affection for vending machines, or at least a foreign fascination with them. Maybe information technology's a holdover from childhood, when the things y'all love nearly are candy, pushing buttons, and getting to do "developed stuff" like handle money: Vending machines neatly encompass all 3. This theory is based on my own experience—I happen to think it is very weird and cool that just nigh everywhere you go, you can purchase snacks and soda from a low-central robot if you lot tin can scrape together a dollar—but too what I observed when ane of my colleagues brought her kids in for a recent Accept Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. "Mom, you could buy united states food from the vending machine," one of them half-suggested, half-guilt-tripped his mother. Fifty-fifty though they'd probably already eaten, fifty-fifty though there were other free foods in the role, what they wanted almost was to feed dollar bills to a motorcar twice their size and exist able to select their very own snacks via buttons. Can you lot arraign them?

As much as we honey vending machines, we don't love them enough to not steal from them. Afterward all, who's going to miss that Snickers but chilling behind a thin pane of plastic in a random parking lot anyway? This explains why the CIA plot—a scheme involving an electronic payment system called FreedomPay—captured our collective imagination, and likewise why the net is littered with lower-fi instructions for vending machine hacking.

If the idea of "hacking" a vending car calls to heed the image of, say, Ryan Lochte or some other muscled oaf shaking a machine existent difficult, know that in this context hacking, aside from the rare endeavor-attaching-a-cord-to-your-dollar-then-you-can-take-it-back fob, mostly refers to a series of codes passed down through urban legend that will supposedly permit y'all to admission the car's hallowed internal menu. An ancient Yahoo Answers thread inquires almost the efficacy of using the code 4-3-2-i-ane-ii-3-1-1 to get to a soda machine's menu—a series of numbers that, if you spend plenty time Googling how to hack a vending machine, you will soon learn employ to the Classic Coke Machine. The idea is that this code will go you into the machine'south menu, where you can reset the prices to gratis. Similar codes are scattered like Nature Valley bar crumbs all over the internet, from long-abandoned message-board threads and posts on Quora and Reddit to an oddly imprecise WikiHow entry. ("Experiment with dissimilar buttons to see various information." Gee, cheers!)

The conventional wisdom on these hacks is that they don't piece of work, though perhaps older machines were susceptible. However, people in the vending automobile industry are loath to so much equally confirm the existence of such codes, lest it would do annihilation to encourage a culture of vending car abuse. The National Automatic Merchandising Association declined to speak to me for this story, and Chris Bracher, Quora's most prolific contributor on the subject of vending machines, told me, "No, the 'hacks' don't work unless they involve counterfeiting, vandalism, or dissentious the machines. Enough people abuse vending machines as information technology is, we really don't need withal another article inspiring people to try information technology out or check for themselves to meet if any of urban legends are true."

Just the hacks accept persisted online and fifty-fifty institute new life on social platforms like YouTube. Videos with titles similar "Top 5 Vending Machine Hacks to Go FREE Drinks and Snacks (WORKS EVERYTIME 2017)" rack upward hundreds of thousands of views, even when they are poorly strung-together compilations of other videos, and they most certainly exercise not piece of work every fourth dimension. Some videos denote that they are "for educational purposes only" at the start as a responsibility dodge, before gleefully segueing to clips of young people giggling over cellphone-shot footage of successful, or at least successfully faked, heists. Some vending auto hacking videos even have their own debunking videos. In a parody of the genre, a video called "How to Hack a Vending Motorcar" from a channel chosen HowToBasic starts off looking like the other instructional videos before devolving into footage of a automobile being smashed and destroyed. That's certainly ane mode to override the arrangement.

In addition to the shady aggregated style of videos, in that location are videos where vloggers promise to requite out the codes or try hacking themselves in their videos … and then proceed to await until the very end of their excruciating vlogs to get to the goods. Witness one video, with the search engine optimization–friendly championship "TRICK ANY VENDING MACHINES TO Give YOU Free Money," where a vlogger named David Vlas spends the first 11 of 13 minutes doing things like visiting a skate park and going to a car wash, earlier finally making his way to some hotel vending machines. For Vlas and his ilk, hacking a vending machine is just content, a stunt they can film and put upward on their channel.

Fifty-fifty though I was pretty doubtful that they would piece of work, in the interest of journalism I felt compelled to endeavor my mitt at vending auto hacking. I wrote down a bunch of codes cribbed from YouTube and took them over to the vending machines that alive in Slate's Brooklyn role. I can ostend that one never worries quite so much almost looking like an alien attempting to contact her home planet than while typing a "code" that consists of "Dr Pepper–Poland Bound–Coke–Diet Coke–Diet Coke–Coke–Poland Spring–Nutrition Coke–Diet Coke" (aka 4-3-2-i-1-ii-three-1-ane) into a vending motorcar in a room total of one'due south co-workers.

I tried a one-half-dozen or then codes, and for the nigh office, zip happened. When I tried the code 4-2-three-1, I got a momentarily promising response—it seemed to cause the display to change, though not to an option I could then manipulate for free drinks, just to some incomprehensible numbers. At this point I made my way back to my seat, resigned to standing to pay for soda for the residue of my life. But subsequently that afternoon came an officewide message: "I don't know if someone forgot a Coke Goose egg in the soda machine or if the soda machine gave me two Coke Zeros, simply if anyone wants a Coke Zero at that place's one upwardly for grabs on the tabular array next to my desk." Could information technology be? Mayhap I did hack my way to a free soda. Or maybe the elves that alive inside our motorcar decided to throw me a bone. Either style, it just proves what I've always thought: Vending machines are a picayune scrap magic.

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Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/04/how-to-hack-vending-machines-with-codes-dont-it-wont-work.html

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