As students are getting ready to graduate and move out of school housing, universities need to make sure that there isn’t any damage, and if there is, it needs to be fixed or paid for.

A student in this story noticed that his school would tell every single student that their LAN cables were broken because a small clip had broken off, and then charge them to replace it. The school, however, would not replace the cable because it technically still worked.

When the student in this story figured out this scam the school was running, he waited for his dorm inspection to take revenge. When the inspector pointed out the broken LAN cable, the student took out a pair of scissors and cut the cord in half. This forced the school to pay to replace the cable entirely, which they should have been doing all along.

To make it even better, many other students learned of his actions and did the same thing. Read through the full details of this wonderful story below and see what you think.

How I (kinda) stopped my B-School from LAN Cable Profiteering

It’s March 2014 and I am just about to finish two years of B-School.

Graduation can definitely come with mixed feelings.

The times are nostalgic, because every day, I am bidding goodbye to close friends, many of whom I will most probably never see again.

At the same time, an extremely annoying process is underway. The hostel wardens and admin are knocking on doors and auditing our hostel rooms for damages.

I’m sure some of these repairs can be expensive.

Now, on the face of it, this is not an unfair ask because students (even 25-year-old B-School Students) can get up to some really nasty stuff in their rooms. And not just stuff which would only be visible in black light.

Four doors down from me – lived a guy, who had, in a burst of creative inspiration super-glued more than 20 CD-ROMs on the inside of his door to use as a ‘special mirror’. When he left, the CDs had to be forcibly taken off and the door’s paintjob was ruined.

Let’s see what happened.

When it came to the LAN cables however, the scam was clear.

Outdated though it might seem, we used to access both the internet and the intranet from inside the hostel by connecting our laptops to a LAN Cable, which was provided by the Hostel’s admin when you joined.

No big deal, this is pretty reasonable.

These LAN cables were the hostel’s property, and in an ideal world, the hostel would want to pass on an undamaged LAN cable to the person who occupies your room after you leave.

If a student damaged the LAN cable, they were liable to pay a fine. The fine was designed to be a deterrent, and had no connection to the real world cost of a LAN Cable. It was probably more than 10 times that cost.

The clips he is talking about aren’t even required to work.

But LAN cables were so cheap that even 10x their cost was not too big an amount – certainly not big enough to fight or face consequences over.

Now, LAN cables aren’t really easy to damage, but they have an annoyingly delicate component – the clip which locks the cable in place once it has been inserted into a port.

Ok, what is the University doing?

These clips wpuld often break with the slightest of mishandling. This wasn’t too big a deal though, since most of the time cables without a clip worked perfectly fine from a connectivity point of view, even if this made them a bit annoying to use.

In all this, either the University, or the Hostel staff (not sure who), discovered a beautiful loophole:

There was no one to check on the condition of the LAN cable that the students were given when they joined.

Oh, this is very sneaky.

In 90+% of cases, new students were given essentially ‘damaged’ LAN Cables, which had no clip in the first place. The fine wasn’t too big an amount, and this obscure fine was anyhow not described on any accessible rulebook, so new students rarely checked the condition of the LAN cable they were given.

And when the admin came knocking, they would never agree that the LAN Cable had always been damaged.

This is very shady.

The individual’s amount was small, and the students were far more interested in making future plans and saying their good-byes, so the impracticality of this fine just never got the attention it deserved.

But collected across more than 500 students, this fee was a substantial sum in the pockets of the admin, who were not spending a single rupee behind buying newer and better LAN Cables for the next batch.

Finally, someone is standing up to the scam.

This happened with a few of my friends, and somehow the scam was just clearly visible to me. What was also clear, was that there was no real way of getting out of it.

When the admin guy came to my room, I explained to him that the cable had always been broken and that I wasn’t responsible for this damage. He refused to listen.

The school is trying to prevent him from fixing the problem just so they can collect money.

I told him that I would like to purchase a new LAN Cable and solve the hostel’s problem, instead of being subjected to an unfair fine.

He laughed it off, and reminded me a couple of times that all this should have been thought of earlier.

If he had broken the clip, that would be one thing. But he clearly didn’t.

I bravely pointed out that the LAN cable wasn’t really damaged, and that it would most probably be passed on as it is, to the room’s new occupant.

He vehemently denied it, and stated that by breaking the clip, I had personally rendered the LAN cable unsuable, and that it would be negligent and ethically questionable for him to just pass this cable on to any newcomer.

Smart move. If they are going to charge him for the cable, they should have to replace it.

For emphasis, I confirmed with him once again, that in his approximation, this LAN cable was damaged and unusable. He concurred, with a lot of irritation.

“And therefore it wouldn’t matter if I do this,” I said, triumphantly, and picked up a large-sized pair of scissors I had sourced with some difficulty.

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Cutting through these cables isn’t as easy as most people would think.

I then proceeded to dramatically attempt cutting the LAN Cable in two, though it wasn’t easy to do with just a pair of scissors. Regardless, after about six or seven determined attempts, the cable’s insulation was shredded at multiple spots and some tiny wire strands inside were very clearly beyond repair.

I then handed the really, truly, completely useless LAN cable to the shocked and violently angry admin guy, along with my fine. “Sorry for the damage, sir,” I said, with a wide smile, “here’s my fine.”

This type of thing will put an end to their scam fast.

From what I heard, this was repeated by many of my batchmates with many different members of the admin staff.

Still unsure though, on whether the admins eventually reached a compromise with the students, or bravely explained the considerable pile of violently shredded LAN cables to the university.

Sometimes you have to get creative to stop an unjust policy. While this guy still had to pay the penalty for the broken cable, at least now the school had to actually replace it. I’m sure this was also a lot of extra work for the team that was running the scam.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a student who was threatened after refusing an elective exam, so they took the case to the district.

Check out what the top commenters on this story had to say about the scam and how it was handled.

Putting a new RJ45 on isn’t hard, if you have the tools.

Wired LANs weren’t uncommon at all in 2014.

You better get your money’s worth.

Keeping the cable for your own use would make sense.

I wonder how much the school ended up making each year on this scam. Even with each fee being small, the total amount would add up quickly. I hope the students spread the word to the next batch of students to keep the tradition going.

Putting an end to a scam like this is a real service to the future students of the school. If it just happened the one year, however, it wouldn’t add up to a big loss.