A student of De Schalm in Vught has unintentionally split a considerable bill in his primary school. During a math lesson, after some clicking around, he came across the webshop of publisher Malmberg. There he then ordered licenses for 500,000 euros.
The error came to light when Malmberg sales staff saw the amount passing by. A nice deal. Perhaps a little too beautiful. That’s why a phone call was made to the school just to be sure. But they knew nothing about that.
“At first we thought we might have been hacked,” says school director Tom van Esch. But soon the monkey came out of the sleeve when they took another good look at the email address. “That name is in group 7 with us.”
“It’s a great learning opportunity for us.”
It turns out: when the boy was unable to log in to the online calculation program, he started searching the internet. He ended up on the Malmberg site, where creating an account for the webshop turned out to be a piece of cake. The email addresses of the students have the same domain name as that of the teachers.
“That was a nice learning moment for us”, Van Esch admits with a laugh. “In the meantime, that has been well taken up by the parties that know about it.” From now on, new accounts must first be approved by the director and head of ICT.
“It looked more like something fictional to that student.”
But what happened to that student? “When I initially asked him if he had ever been on that site, it didn’t ring a bell. But I was allowed to take a look at the history of his laptop. It turned out that the suspicions were correct.”
Finally, a conversation was held with the student and his parents. Not as a punishment, but as a lesson for the future. “He certainly had no wrong intentions and was completely unaware of the consequences. I think it looked more like something fictional to him. If I click on this button, an amount of money will be added.”
In the end, it turned out to be a special, but instructive experience for all parties. “Of course it starts with that this should not be technically possible. There was just a leak,” Van Esch admits. “But all in all, it’s resolved nicely.”