Posted on April 29, 2019 at 12:01 PM
McDonald’s App Hamburgled, 4 Victims Already Saddled Thousands in Charges
It’s easy to pay for a single McDonald’s meal. It might even be OK to pay for a large family. A birthday party can cost a pretty penny, so imagine how much it would take out of your pocket if someone ordered hundreds of meals on your account – that you had to pay.
Well, that’s what is happening in Canada, where a local Quebecois has taken their admiration of the hamburgler to heart in a McDonald’s spree that has seen four victims lose thousands of dollars to the Hamburger Hacker.
McDonald’s App not secure
It seems that someone is able to hack the McDonald’s app and order food for themselves remotely. One victim, Patrick O’Rourke, said that he has lost thousands of dollars to the hacker and only recently realized that someone had hacked him. He is the managing editors of a tech news website called MobileSyrup and is one of those people who take internet security to heart.
Patrick says that he thinks it’s likely one person who is sharing the accounts he has hacked with friends. He is the latest victim in a series of stories that stretch back to February. While the victims come from all over Canada, all the food has been ordered in Quebec. This has lead the Police to believe that it is a Quebec local that has been pulling off the hacks.
Patrick has said that McDonald’s has been of no use as a resource and they have not helped him resolve the massive theft from his account at all. He is among a growing list of vocal McDonald’s critics that are advocating people not to link their bank accounts to the McDonald’s app.
“To me, it just seems like a little bit negligent… like they don’t really care,” he said. “McDonald’s should at least be sending out a mass email to everyone that has the account [to say], ‘Hey, you should reset your password.’ ”
It’s clear from his quotes that Patrick is not a happy customer and many on social media are starting to take notice. What particularly irritates the more tech-savvy customers is the manner in which McDonald’s is trying to understate its role in security. The simple fact that they will not send out a message asking people to change their password is completely and utterly negligent according to anyone in the information security industry.
This isn’t even the first time that McDonald’s in Cadan has come under fire. There was the Monopoly theft where McDonald’s annual Monopoly game was rigged so that the perpetrators walked away with a million dollar prize and beat the 1 in 250 million odds to do it. The thefts were so brazen that even the perpetrators were surprised that McDonald’s did not take any notice of them.
McDonald’s refuses to budge
McDonald’s has issued a press release once CBC News got involved in the investigation. They claim that their app is secure, along with any customer information they might possess. They say that the victims are isolated instances that it has no control over.
The company simply repeated that its customers should make sure that they have strong passwords to keep this kind of attack from happening to anyone else. Many people have faulted McDonald’s for not having 2 Factor Authentication on its app and for not allowing Apple Pay to be a payment option.
While the press release said that if any customers noted unauthorized purchases, they should go to their bans and change their passwords, they say that the scale is so small that it does not merit a mass message for all users to change their passwords.
It seems McDonald’s is so large that they simply could not be bothered with a little theft here and there. After all, if they did not notice the theft of a million dollars during the Monopoly heist, then what is a few thousand dollars in its customers pocket going to do?
