Oneplus invite system, frustrating, flawed and now hacked

The Oneplus Two launched launched last week to some mixed feelings from potential buyers around the globe; from the typical “Take my money” fanboy attitude, to measured “I probably wont buy, here’s why” through to the other extreme of a big fat nope.

One of the biggest issues for potential buyers of the new Oneplus device is the invite system, you can easily reserve your place in the queue however; if you’re not inviting others to reserve a place you will quickly find yourself dropping down the list.

One potential buyer took exception to this when his position went from about 9000 to over 70,000 and unfortunately for Oneplus this user has the know how to play and play he did…

After finding a way to elevate himself in the queue and attempting to contact Oneplus on Twitter, Jake Cooper posted some pretty detailed instructions on how to “hack” the system to bring his place in the queue for an invite back to a fair number.

OnePlus, responded to the hack with a forum post from one of their staff, noting that they are aware of the fraudulent ways users may employ to elevate themselves up the queue and are working to find those, remove them and of course make this behaviour more difficult (they appear to have deliberately avoided saying “Impossible” because thats just a challenge to hackers right?). In the post they acknowledge that there are a number of people working to get around the invite system and that:

Chief among them all was RealJakeCooper, who wrote an elaborate post on how to bump yourself up the reservation list using a script. We knew this was possible, and we’ve been monitoring the list for such behavior. It’s not too widespread, but it is noticeable. We’ve already implemented a few measures on our end to limit it, but before any invites go out we will fine-comb the list for fraudulent entries (there’s a multitude of ways to check for this) and we will continue to introduce measures to make it ever more difficult.

With the invitations flying all over the internet, it would appear that Jakes place in the queue dropped, and after being advised by OnePlus that they had fixed his initail exploit – he did it again. He found a second way to manipulate the Oneplus invite system boosting his queued position back up to the pointy end of the queue.

NB. Ausdroid does not condone hacking or any other form of illegal online activities, we are reporting this as news relating to an upcoming device release. If you choose to test these methods of jumping the Oneplus queue, it is at your own risk.

Its great to see that Oneplus did however, acknowledge Jakes efforts to contact them once the exploit was discovered and labelled him a “white hat” (hacker looking for security flaws, not aiming to deliberately and maliciously exploit them) with the reward of an extra invite heading his way, although with the second method of elevation now to his name Oneplus may rethink that.

How far have you dropped in the Oneplus Two queue since you first put your name up for an invite to buy?