To his credit, Odio said he wasn't going to buy himself a tablet. He planned to sell the card on eBay and donate the proceeds to Save The Children. After news of Odio's exploit reached the web, he offered to return the money if Stark considered it theft.

Starbucks then apparently felt it was time to end the experiment.

Stark got the idea for the social experiment because Starbucks only allows customers to link a Starbucks card to one phone at a time. As a developer, Stark often uses more than one phone. He found out that a screenshot of the app worked just like the real deal at the register. He and encouraged people to use it and deposit money when the account got low.

It will be interesting to see how Starbucks goes forward with its iOS app. Stark was presumably the first person to figure out that he could use an image to bypass Starbucks' one-phone-at a-time rule, but others will surely follow.