Meta's Card Catastrophe: Payments as Corporate Benefits

A group of hackers was fired precisely for the kind of behavior that tech companies typically reward—finding technical loopholes.

If you’re going to fire somebody, make sure it’s not for something you did wrong.

Days before a significant round of layoffs, Meta sacked about 25 people for using their employee benefits in the way they saw fit. From the point of view of Meta, these people “abused” their $25 daily food allowance to buy things that weren’t food, or from places that weren’t the office.

It would make sense if Meta couldn’t control this behavior. But it could.

I find preposterous that the media has portrayed these people as exploiters and opportunists, implying that their yearly salaries ($400,000, if we are to trust Entrepreneur.com) somehow prohibits them from using their corporate benefits in a way that’s legal, and especially in a way that Meta tacitly allowed.

Companies can issue corporate cards to their employees, and they can restrict how these cards are used with control and ease.

But if you leave the room for a gamified experience, with free stuff involved, what are a bunch of hackers going to do?

This is The Payments Engineer Playbook, and today we’re looking at Merchant Category Codes, and how companies and employees around the world make the most of them.

In this world, nothing can be said to be certain