True Stories #389 - In His Site

Computer guy Brian McCracy got stung by a traffic camera, but he got his sweet revenge.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. Bluff City, Tennessee. The year was twenty ten.
Computer network designer Brian McCrary was in a hurry on

(00:22):
the highway and he was pushing that speed limit, so
a little bit past the limit, and oh man, we
all know that sinking feeling when we realized there was
a police car on our bumper and we see those
flashing lights in our rear view mirror. We were trying
to get somewhere just a little bit faster, but we

(00:44):
were going to be late anyway, and we would arrive
with our wallet just a little bit lighter. That is
so irritating. And Brian McCrary was irritated. But he had
not been pulled over by a police car directing him
to the shoulder of the road. He had been picked
up on a traffic camera which logged his speeding vehicle,

(01:08):
took a photo and sent it to the city database.
And a few days later Brian would open an envelope
with a speeding ticket inside of it. He had just
gone out to get the mail and he had gotten
stung with a citation. The damage was ninety bucks. Now

(01:29):
those of us who have gotten speeding tickets are likely
thinking ninety dollars. That doesn't seem like a lot. Aren't
speeding tickets closer to like one hundred and fifty dollars
or more? But for Brian, the cost of his crime
would be ninety bucks, or he could take it to
traffic court. Not worth it. He would mail in the penalty,

(01:51):
but he would not get over how miffed he was
at getting stung for not driving really all that fast.
It wasn't a hardened criminal doing evil deeds. He was
a driver on his commute. It all felt so very wrong,
so on a whim that he started thinking of ways

(02:13):
to get back at the system that had wronged him.
Remember that Brian McCrary was a computer network guy. So
he logged onto the Internet and he cruised on over
to the domain provider Go Daddy, and he browsed available
website domain names, and wouldn't you know it, there it

(02:35):
was plain as day the Bluff City Police Department official
website domain Bluff citypd dot com. But the city had
accidentally allowed the domain to expire. Oh this was too
good an opportunity to pass up, So Brian typed in

(02:57):
his credit card number, and he commented eared it. The
man with the speeding ticket now had the ticket to
own Bluff City's public page, and he wasted no time.
He made a website and he posted complaints about traffic
cameras and how invasive the whole thing was, how he

(03:17):
and the population of Bluff City deserved better than to
be monitored from towers by cameras that weren't even capable
of a discussion about the circumstances, or that could be
challenged by law abiding drivers who were getting a bad rap.
On top of his rants about the city, he posted
an unflattering cartoon of a smiling police officer clutching a

(03:43):
big wad of cash. Brian even opened up the website
to other people so they could post their own rants
and make their own complaints, and all the while the
Bluff City Police Department couldn't do anything but watch it
all happen. They had allowed the domain to become public domain.

(04:05):
And this had happened because the city's website manager had
been gone. He had been on medical leave. It was
just a lucky and an unlucky break, depending on which
side of the speeding ticket you had been on. This
kind of thing does happen from time to time. There
was a story of a woman. Her neighborhood homeowners' association

(04:27):
had been giving her real grief because her roof was
in disrepair. They demanded the roof be fixed. It was
going to cost the woman five thousand dollars that she
did not have. When she eventually sold her house, she
bought the expired domain of the HOA and she held
that domain for ransom. Guess how much money she wanted yep,

(04:52):
five thousand dollars. There was another guy. He was a
web and graphic designer. He'd been hired by a company
as an inn dependent contractor and he built this website
which produced terrific profits for retail sales, but he saw
none of that even though he created the entire structure
behind it. The company blew off his requests for some

(05:15):
kind of percentage and they terminated his contract. So when
that domain expired, guess who was waiting in the wings.
And he bought out not just the dot com domain
but all of the variations dot net, dot store, etc.
And they had to buy the domain back from him
for thousands. There was one guy who bought the domain

(05:39):
of a newspaper publisher, and for some reason he redirected
it to a porn site. And as you can imagine,
so many of these domain snipers do find themselves in
court legally, those who are registering protected trademarks or acting
in what the courts will deem bad faith, they can

(06:02):
get into serious trouble. But Brian McCrary of Tennessee was
not sued and he never gave up or sold the
UURL back to the city. And today, for some reason,
that police department address takes you to an online gambling site.

(06:22):
Maybe Brian did that on purpose as well. But the
lesson is this, you probably shouldn't anger a computer guy
with a grudge, or else he might put your online
home in his sites. And that is a true story

(06:48):
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