“This is how my colleagues and I had free lunch for weeks. Around 2010, McDonald’s introduced its McWrap in Sweden. To promote their tasty new wraps, they created a game in the McDonald’s iPhone app, where one could find free wraps on a map while walking around in the real world. In order to receive a real McWrap, we had to find a wrap on the map, get there, pick it up by holding down our finger on the map, and then continue holding our finger on our phone’s screen until we could redeem the virtual wrap at a nearby McDonald’s. If we let go of the screen, we would drop the virtual wrap and risk a hungry competitor stealing our virtual wrap. There were three different flavors and we could try one flavor once per registered account. Soon the wraps were getting scarce, and it was only easy to find wraps located far from any McDonald’s.
Using a jailbroken iPad together with two unofficial apps (one for switching between apps without putting them in background mode, and one for faking my GPS location), I was able to move wraps to anywhere in the world. I could park outside McDonald’s and get my wraps from wherever they were to be found immediately.
However, I realized after a couple of days that it started to get tricky to find wraps at all. Others were obviously using the same technique. I had to hide my virtual wraps. The wraps would only show on the map if I was zoomed in enough, so if I could find a remote location in the world where nobody was likely to look, I could keep a pile of private virtual wraps.
I settled for a very remote island in the North Sea. I spent a couple of hours moving wraps there and soon I had my very own McWrap island filled with 100’s of wraps. I ate free lunch for weeks. My colleagues would call me up requesting wraps to be sent to various McDonald’s locations at lunchtime, a request that I happily helped out with. Eventually, McDonald’s found out about the trick and started to log how many kilometers a wrap had traveled. I didn’t get very disappointed by this, as I was pretty tired of McWraps by then.”
