[wpietri]

I agree that it's an unpleasant truth, but I think it's the truth.

Imagine he went to a local car company that had just two stores. Imagine he says to the owner, "Hey, I'm going to pay you €418 to drive one of your cars back and forth between your stores for two days. You do all the paperwork as if I'm renting the car 36 times. And then you buy €3000 worth of air miles and give them to me. How about it?"

No rational business owner would do that. They only reason Avis did that is that they are so large that they can't run it sensibly; instead, like programmers, they try to construct systems of rules that approximate a sane business. This guy found a bug in the system, forcing Avis to do something that is definitely not in their best interests.

It's a smart and well-constructed scam, but it's definitely a scam. And the guy knows it. He carefully tests Avis rules. He works around Avis's safeguards. He knew not to push it too far, which is why he limited it to two days. And I'll lay good money right now that there's already some programmer at Avis who is writing code to look for reservations like this and automatically consolidate them, as well as a lawyer who's wondering how to change the T&Cs to prevent this.

As to the latter bit, that is true of any scammer. For example, think of all the good that fake Nigerian princes could do with the money they take.