CSC ServiceWorks laundry machine coin bypass (2023)

I&#x27;ve had this thought about payment cards for a long time now. Corporations are pulling a reverse Superman III on us and keeping our pennies and dollars on these gift cards and payment cards that can never quite be zeroed out. If you added up all the lost change from all of these cards over someone&#x27;s life it could be a fairly non-trivial amount of money. Add this up over a whole economy of people and you have millions of dollars of change that you&#x27;ve siphoned out of people by making it too difficult to spend.<p>There should be a law mandating the ability to convert gift cards or payment cards back into cash, or to reverse the transaction onto a credit card.

Back in my days in the coin-op business, we wrote code that watched the length of that coin input pulse.<p>Too short or too long - it got rejected. It eliminated a lot of the abuse cases with coins on strings, people kicking the coin acceptors to move the microswitch, etc.

If you&#x27;re going to open up the panel, think bigger than one round of laundry. That is doing a lot of work every time, that apart the spite factor isn&#x27;t going to be worth your time. Rather, you can install a reed switch (or these days perhaps something like an ESP32) between the appropriate wires, and tape it to the back of the panel. Then put the whole thing back together, and you can use the machines for free any time by swiping a magnet over the appropriate place.

Also posted a year ago <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37026831">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37026831</a><p>Some discussion exploiting a security bug 2 months ago (20 points, 9 comments) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40402343">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40402343</a> (6 points, 5 comments) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40392915">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40392915</a><p>edit: thanks ziml77

I was looking at an outdoor coin-up machine that warned messing with it was a federal crime that could cost a $4000 or so fine and 14 years in jail. Seems excessive to the point where I woulsn’t want to risk it.

I seem to recall that their app also pushed lottery tickets.

Recent semi-related post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40402343">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40402343</a>

Find a laundromat nearby that will wash and fold your clothes. It&#x27;s actually not a lot more expensive than what the machines charge and that&#x27;s not accounting for malfunctions, unobtainable refunds, too-small-to-use balances left over on payment cards, your time waiting around while the machines run, detergent, fabric softeners, ruined clothes because you didn&#x27;t realize that the previous user washed a load of greasy shop towels in the machine, etc.<p>Drop off a bag of laundry in the morning, pick up clean folded clothes in the evening. You&#x27;re dealing with local owners most likely, or at least humans not some app or website.

Then what happens when the landlord goes to collect the money and sees the box is empty?

I agree, in principle, which the spirit of this article and find it fascinating from a technical perspective. That being said...<p>&gt; What are they going to do, sue you over $2?<p>Nope! They&#x27;ll just let your local government do that for them and go back to their evil mustache twirling.

Now for extra bonus points, wire in a ESP32 to flip the switch remotely, so you don&#x27;t have to open the service panel every time (and perhaps help out the neighbors).

A guide on how to get evicted?

&gt; <i>Get inside the service panel somehow;</i><p>If you do this in my CSC laundry room, I will hunt you down. :)<p>We have enough CSC problems, without someone going in and hotwiring the already fragile IoT.<p>That breaks it more, and also spoils what little pressure we can apply on CSC (because a vandal hotwiring is obviously not their fault).<p>&gt; <i>replaced all of the prepaid card machines with app&#x2F;coin-op machines. This left most residents with prepaid cards that still have funds on them.</i><p>Same here. We&#x27;re very unhappy with the CSC IoT. Additionally, the IoT was somehow integrated badly with the coin box, such that the system now very frequently eats quarters and refuses to work. (Rather than fail to at least the coin boxes working reliably, like they have for decades.)<p>(We&#x27;re also still waiting, months later, to be reimbursed for the balances on the payment cards that we mailed them.)<p>HNer personal relevance: having at best 50&#x2F;50 chance of any weekly laundry chore going smoothly is one of the smaller of the injustices that ramen startups (the kind that can afford only to occupy a low-end apartment building) have to put up with. Maybe the world would be better if more of us weren&#x27;t so insulated by upper-middle income, from immediate externalities of what we build.

&gt;CSC ServiceWorks steals small amounts of money from large amounts of people. They provide laundry machines to apartment buildings and condominiums (where the residents have already paid for the rent, water, and electricity) and then charge exorbitant fees to use them.<p>Then don&#x27;t live there? It&#x27;s not like the fact that a given building uses such machines is a secret. Moreover the sense of entitlement is is bizarre. The fact that you pay for &quot;rent, water, and electricity&quot; has no bearing on whether you&#x27;re entitled to free laundry or not. Does the OP also think you&#x27;re entitled to free food at a hotel because you already paid for the room? There are legitimate grievances that the OP could have focused on (eg. them discontinuing payment cards with money on them), but they&#x27;re drowned out by childish complaints that the author decided to make.