A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania graduate student has gone viral for an unusual debt incurred with the world’s biggest coffee chain.
On April 24, Josh Casto (@bohrmagnezone on Twitter), a fifth year chemistry student at the University of Pittsburgh, tweeted about a recent experience with the Starbucks app that led him to be indebted to the big green siren.
“Starbucks accidentally gave me enough stars for a free drink but they caught the error and now they’re making me work off my star debt #%&$@!l? just big and greedy,” Casto wrote in his viral tweet, which shared a pair of screenshots from his personal Starbucks app. The first shows a “Star balance” of -33 stars, and the second, presumably after he made a purchase, shows a balance of -23 stars.
Starbucks offers a rewards program through its app that allows customers to earn stars through repeat transactions, earning one or two stars per $1 spent. Those stars can then be redeemed for rewards like extra espresso shots, free drinks, pastries or even some Starbucks merch like tumblers and more..
Many responses under Casto’s tweet share similar experiences to his.
“BYE THEY TOOK MINE AWAY TOO,” wrote one user on Twitter with a sobbing emoji. The user shared a screenshot of a -200.0 star earned promotion transaction.
“Same here!!” wrote another user, showing their balance as -77 stars. “I got the 200 stars and got a drink and now I’m in star debt lmao.”
So, how did this happen?
“I received the stars after following a promotional link for 200 stars (enough for a free drink) that took me to the rewards page of the Starbucks website,” Casto tells TODAY.com, adding that he was greeted with a “Success!” notification after claiming the promo.
“The stars were loaded onto my account in a few hours and the next morning I redeemed the 200 stars for a free drink with no issues,” he says.
Casto was far from the only person who redeemed this code online. According to the absolutely extensive amount of social media posts linking to the same image with the same QR code across the internet on April 22, potentially thousands of people had access to this one QR code.
According to another April 22 post on Reddit, several Redditors reported successfully redeeming the code that day, although as time went on, others reported that it had stopped working after a while.
“Seeing as it’s not working for a lot of people now, I’m assuming Starbucks finally caught on to the glitch,” another Redditor replied to the post. “Some dev is gonna be in trouble…”
And it was, indeed, too good to be true. Casto says when he opened the Starbucks app after his freebie later that day, he noticed he had a balance of -33 stars.
“That’s when I realized they did not want that promotion to go to everyone and in order to compensate for that they took away the stars I earned from buying coffee,” Casto says. “So they took away the 167 stars I had and put me in a negative balance for what I still owed.”
A Starbucks spokesperson confirmed that the QR code was the cause of the issue.
“On Saturday April 22, a QR code for bonus Stars given to attendees at an in-person event spread online, going beyond the intended audience,” a Starbucks spokesperson tells TODAY.com. “The Stars redeemed through this code have been removed from ineligible accounts. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Casto says he didn’t expect the tweet to get so much attention, but quickly realized from his replies that his situation, while unusual, was not unique. “I definitely enjoyed reading all the jokes in the quotes and replies about me being locked up by my local baristas until I pay back what I owe though,” he says.
“You think this is an accident? Not a chance. Starbucks wants you in star debt so you will keep grinding for them, working ever harder to pay it off, taking high interest loans and odd jobs out of desperation,” joked one Twitter user.
“Bahahaha star debt collectors are coming your way,” wrote one Twitter user, to which another replied, “Gonna repossess all the coffee mugs.”
“Honestly, I would not have cared if they took stars back before I used them. Errors in online promotions happen all the time so I get it,” Casto says. “I’m not angry by any means but it’s funny and annoying to me in a ‘this super huge global company is so ridiculous right now’ way because they want me to pay them back 33 stars, a made up currency, that was effectively $0.93 of the drink I got with the promotion.”
Casto says that he could easily make a new account to circumvent his star debt, so he thinks the decision to back charge customers for stars is odd. Either way, he still has a deficit to work off.
“I’m still in star debt!” Casto says. “I’ve worked off what I owe down to -12 stars.”
