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Comment by harrisi | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting because they've apparently made a couple thousand dollars reporting things to other companies. Is it just a case of a broken clock being right twice a day? Seems like a terrible use of everyone's time and money. I find it hard to believe a random person on the internet using ChatGPT is worth $1000.

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There are places that will pay bounties on even very flimsy reports to avoid the press / perception that they aren't responding to researchers. But that's only going to remain as long as a very small number of people are doing this.

It's easy for reputational damage to exceed $1'000, but if 1000 people do this...

One might even call it reputational blackmail. "Give me $1000 for this invalid/useless bug report or I'll go to the most click-baity incompetent tech press outlets with how your product is the worst thing since ILUVYOU."

$1000 is cheap... The real question is when will companies become wise to this scam?

Most companies make you fill in expense reports for every trivial purchase. It would be cheaper to just let employees take the cash - and most employees are honest enough. However the dishonest employee isn't why they do expense reports (there are other ways to catch dishonest employees). There used to be a scam where someone would just send a bill for "services" and those got paid often enough until companies realized the costs and started making everyone do the expense reports so they could track the little expenses.

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