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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

This ticks me off every time i see it. Neither Amazon, nor Google or any other tech company are allowed to make laws. It's a breach of the terms of service maybe, and maybe illegal, but whatever the terms of service say is not a law and said terms of service could be themselves illegal.

They have enough power, please stop attributing them even more by your choice of terms.

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It is most definitely illegal to buy and use stolen credentials from darknet markets (which is what the author hypothesizes happened in this case). It is also illegal to misrepresent the service you are providing to a customer.

It is not that they are creating new laws, it's that the dev committed theft of services and fraud (existing well established laws) as he utilized the system with intent to receive free services that were directly forbidden in the grant from google.

It's likely wire fraud

free credits is not money. FAANG can't just create money by saying we give you 100k credits

Wire fraud doesn't require that you're stealing money:

> Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or *property* by means of false or fraudulent pretenses ...

(18 USC 1343)

Property here includes stealing services of value (in fact it even includes intangibles such as confidential info or goodwill, see Carpenter v. United States 484 US 19).

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