A Romanian security researcher has built a money-making machine that exploits the gaps in currency exchanges, rounding up errors made in the process of moving from one currency to another.
The device, originally built to test the security of online banking systems, looks to fix the fact when customers exchange certain denominations of currency, they can end up getting a small amount of added value because the participating bank has rounded it up.
Dr Adrian Furtuna, who invented the machine, claims if it is left to run at its top speed, it can generate around US$95 a day.
“The trick is that users can choose the amounts that they want to exchange such that the rounding will be always done in their favour,” Furtuna told the BBC.
Thousands of transactions are needed a day for the machine to create real value because the amounts involved are so small.
Furtuna has so far been unable to test the machine on a live banking system because the bank which agreed to test it would not give him access. So far it has only been tested in a lab.
“Banks believe that nobody can do a high number of transactions in a feasible time since each transaction requires to be signed using the [authentication] device,” he said
“By building this machine I proved that this assumption is wrong and transactions can be automated with or without an [authenticator].”
