AI in practice

Brit scams McDonald's out of 100 free meals using ChatGPT

Matthias Bastian

Ideogram prompted by THE DECODER

A British man used ChatGPT to scam 100 free meals at McDonald's. He collected receipts with unique feedback codes and used ChatGPT to write 1,200-character complaint messages. Within twelve hours, a McDonald's employee offered him two to four meal vouchers. After nine months, however, he was discovered by a restaurant and the scam was exposed. The British man defends his actions as harmless, but the example shows how AI can be misused for fraud. The biggest victim in this story, apart from the restaurant, is probably the British man himself, who put his health at risk for this experiment.