Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
When you can be in the right place at the right time, you can really make some things happen for yourself. Take, for instance, Volodymyr Kvashuk, who moved from Ukraine to the US for a career in computer science and wound up working as an engineer for Microsoft. According to a new must-read feature from Bloomberg, that was exactly the right time to turn a loophole in Microsoft’s payment testing apparatus into a multimillion-dollar Bitcoin scheme — and a sick lake house.
Kvashuk’s job was to look for flaws in how Microsoft processed payments by buying things like physical hardware using a company card and a fake login. Microsoft knew enough to not send him a Dell PC every time he ordered one, but Xbox gift cards bought online and sent to…
