Customer hacks ISP website, does what the ISP could not and then gets a thank you

This is one story of hacking a website and making a change to your account that seems to have had a happy ending. According to the story, Douglas Mezzer and his roommate had a DSL account with iiNet and everything was going great until his roommate moved out. The DSL continued to work, however the billing was in the roommates name, and due to him not living there and Douglas being responsible for the bill, he thought it fitting to have the name on the account changed.

Of course, it was not that easy. What sounded like a simple name change ended up turning into something much more. It seems that when Douglas logged in he was able to update the address, phone number, email address, date of birth and a few other fields, however he was restricted from making any changes to the first and last name. What to do — he was forced to call customer service and have them make the change. Unfortunately, that also came with a $59 price tag. With little else to do, Douglas went ahead with the change despite having to pay, but it did not end there.

The next bill arrived and was still addressed to his old roommate. Just figuring that it was caught in a cross, he waited till the next bill, once again assuming that it would come addressed to himself. No luck, it was still addressed to his old roommate, so he took the matter in his own hands.

Douglas launched the ISP website and began checking the HTML with the Firebug plugin for Firefox. He made a few changes, which included adding his name and removing the “disabled” tag. Surprisingly it worked, his name was now changed. He even logged in and out to confirm and although he remained skeptical this change was confirmed when the next monthly bill came addressed to himself.

Thankfully in this case, there was a happy ending. Not only did Douglas get the bill to finally come in his name, but the Comms Manager at iiNet also made an effort to contact Douglas to thank him. I wonder if they also removed that $59 charge, or maybe removed the charge and then gave him an additional credit for making the change himself.

Moral of the story, in this case there was a happy ending, but I would not expect that to happen very often. In other words, while dealing with your ISP can be frustrating, it is most likely not wise to try and hack their website. Of course, if you do, we would love to hear the story.

Read [The Daily WTF] Via [Consumerist]