THE XBOX CHEAT

Microsoft operates a sort of digital bank, which handles millions, if not billions, of dollars each year. One of the company’s junior engineers figured out how to rob it

- Austin Carr

THE XBOX GIFT CARD CAME WITH A STRING of 25 letters and numbers. The digits, known as a 5x5 code, were sent in an email, but they were no different from the numbers and letters etched onto the gift cards hanging on tall racks near the checkout aisle at CVS or Target, arrayed in a Rubik’s Cube of colors. These stores sell them on behalf of Apple, Applebee’s, Disney, Domino’s, and pretty much every other company you can think of, including Microsoft Corp., which markets its cards under the Xbox brand. The cards themselves, of course, are worthless, but each 5x5 code corresponds to a dollar amount. In this case the code, DD9J9-MXXXC-3Y6XD-3QH2C-PWDWZ, was worth $15 toward the purchase of anything Microsoft sold online—video games, Office and Windows software, Lenovo laptops, Sonos speakers, and the like.

In this way, gift cards can be thought of as a sort of digital currency, not unlike Bitcoin. The comparison may seem silly, given that gift cards date to the bygone era of Blockbuster Video, but today there are online marketplaces where anyone can trade gift card codes for Bitcoin and then turn the spoils into cash. These markets inevitably attract speculators and, because trades can be conducted anonymously, scammers.

Volodymyr Kvashuk received the $15 code a few weeks before Christmas, in 2017, among a batch of 20 others worth $300 altogether. But the engineer, who went by Vova for short and was in his mid-20s, hadn’t paid for the Xbox gift cards himself, nor were they some early holiday present from relatives. Kvashuk had recently begun a full-time job at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., testing the company’s e-commerce infrastructure.