Sanmay Ved
Sanmay Ved bought Google.com for a minute, but donated his reward to charity.
Ved thought he was just being cute, but Google decided to give Ved a financial reward anyway. At the time, Ved declined to share how much Google awarded him, only telling Business Insider it was "more than 10,000."
In a blog post today, Google spilled the beans.
"Our initial financial reward to Sanmay-$6,006.13-spelled-out Google, numerically (squint a little and you'll see it!). We then doubled this amount when Sanmay donated his reward to charity," Google writes.
That's right: Ved's reward was a silly number-based game. As Google notes here, Ved ended up giving his winnings to educational charity The Art of Living India.
That blog post was intended to share the results of Google's bug bounty program, where it pays out cash to hackers for finding flaws in the search giant's services. In 2015, Google says, it paid out $2 million to over 300 hackers and security researchers.
Another funny story from that blog post - the most prolific Google bug bounty hunter of the year, Tomasz Bojarski, was paid out an award because he found a security flaw in Google's web form to report security flaws.