Grass Valley, CA — A local hacker group calling themselves the 420 Knights successfully installed adult videos onto area Safeway self-checkout machines. The group, which took responsibility for the act yesterday via a Twitter feed, said that they were doing this to “disrupt the robots” and to “give power back to the people.” The tweet also contained a #FeelTheBern hashtag.
According to several customer accounts, the pornography appeared right after they entered their “Club Card” rewards number.
“So I get to the self-checkout,” said Cedar Ridge resident Janet Williams, “and I don’t like it. I mean, who likes it? I only do it because I convince myself that it’s faster. Anyhow, so I’m there, and I enter my phone number and up pops this porn video. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at until all of the groaning and grunting started. So then I started to frantically touch the screen trying to get it to turn off. Everyone was looking at me. Finally, it stopped and it went to the produce selection screen. Jeeze,that was a little awkward.”
According to a Safeway press release, the company says it is unsure how the hackers gained access to the highly secured checkout machines, and added that consumers have nothing to fear regarding this break-in as they believe at the time of this writing no customer data was compromised.
“This is a childish prank played by immature hackers,” said Safeway spokeswoman Bethany Milbright. “We take our customer data very seriously. And I want to reassure our Safeway family they their data is secured by a cloud data service not stored on the automated checkout agents. So although this incident is indeed embarrassing for both our customers and Safeway, no customer data was compromised.”
According to Grass Valley Police department, they are investigating the incident and might require the assistance of State and/or Federal investigators to find the culprits.
