| This is only marginally related, but I have a story about how I "hacked" Ebay way back in 200x. At the time they provided a free VIN report whenever you listed a vehicle for sale. VIN reports provide details of the history of your car (liens, accidents, maintenance, title transfers, etc). And the leading VIN services charge about $10 per report. I wrote a PHP script that, when given a VIN number, would create a listing on Ebay for a car with that VIN number. The script then kicked off a website scraper which would monitor the listing page for the VIN report data to be populated (sometimes took a few seconds). Once the data was captured, the script would unlist the item (so I wouldn't be stuck selling a car that didnt exist). Bam! Free VIN reports. So I took it a step further and registered and designed a website for it. It looked very semi-professional and web 2.0-ish as I have some decent design skills. There were sample reports and calls-to-action and everything. A user would provide a VIN, pay with paypal checkout, and get the VIN report emailed to them within minutes. The report was stripped of all data pointing to the original source, and reformatted & rebranded with my site's name. All automated of course, since I had already wrote the scripts to do the heavy lifting. I then set up an Adwords campaign, researched price points and settled on $7.99 per report. My ad campaign used targeted keywords that displayed my ads whenever people searched for "carfax" and "vin report", with my price displayed prominently in the ad block. The more money I allotted for ads, the more money the hack made. For about 3 weeks I just sat back and watched the money roll in. In the interest of not drawing too much attention, I would disable the entire site and ad campaign during the day, only running it at night. I was thinking 'slow and steady wins the race.' But the whole time I was working on it, I felt a rush: part paranoia about getting caught, part excitement at crafting such a sneaky, sophisticated hack with so many moving parts. In the end, ebay noticed an anomaly in their api usage data caused by me creating and deleting so many car listings, and sent me a nastygram. I decided to shut up shop before they realized what I was really up to. Greed will get you 'got' quicker than not. In the end, I learned a lot -- it was my first experience working with ad campaigns, writing parses/scrapers, and working with ebays api. |