By Luke Matthews Audience Writer 12:44, 22 FEB 2021
An eight-year-old girl has left the internet in stitches after her uncle shared the brilliant “con” she created to get out of online learning for weeks.
Twitter user Mike Piccolo shared a brilliant thread on how the school pupil had managed to fool “my sister, my brother in law, the teacher, the school’s computer teacher, the principal and Zoom’s support team”.
He explains that his sister has three children, all of which are currently at home doing Zoom classes with their schools during the pandemic.
But he says “mysteriously” one day his niece’s Zoom stopped working during a lesson, and despite her mum trying for an hour she could not log back on and simply assumed it had been a “weird glitch”.
For the next two days the problem persisted, with the mum explaining to the teacher that her daughter was having technical problems and Zoom would not let her log in.
She tried using Zoom in a different house, spent an hour on the phone with Zoom’s technical support and the teacher even attempted create a new meeting for the entire class in the hope she could access it – all with no luck.
For the next two weeks her mum gave up on online classes and began homeschooling her daughter instead, with the problem seemingly unsolvable.
Eventually the mum sent her daughter to try working from her friend’s house, who happened to walk around the corner at the same time the girl was logging out of her Zoom account, who quickly claimed it “wasn’t working very well”.
Mike wrote on Twitter: “The walls are closing in for my poor unsuspecting niece. “My sister’s friend is on to the con at this point. She now secretly watches from the other room where my niece cannot see her. After about an hour on Zoom, my niece can’t take it anymore and executes the con to escape the boredom.
“My sister’s friend watches as my niece logs out, then repeatedly types in the wrong password to her account about 20 times. What my niece had figured out is that when you log in with an incorrect password, Zoom will lock your account for a set amount of time.
“The more times you do this, the longer the wait period for you to get back into Zoom. She also noticed that the error that is presented to a user when they are locked is ‘Incorrect password’ and not ‘your account has been locked’.
“My niece found the exploit and combined it with her cute 8 year old face, a face that never could tell a lie much less pull off an elaborate scheme to trick no less that 8 adults for 3 weeks straight.”
The thread racked up thousands of likes as the girl’s mum replied to one person who asked if she had seen her daughter’s “brilliance or just her underhandedness” to say: “I’m her mom, and I see both! Sneaky little thing, but I can’t blame her for being sick of Zoom!”
People loved that the pupil had managed to keep up the con for so long, as one said: “Seriously, legend kid move. Love it.” And another wrote: “I admire the kid’s hustle and creativity. Really feeling for your sister, brother in law, and her teacher, though. Sounds so exhausting.”