Only a tiny fraction of society are born with a hustler gene. Not only do these people find ways to bypass the rules, they seem to rewrite them altogether. And what for? If not for the thrill, then for getting what they want.
Call it a selfish code in their DNA or a Wolf of Wall Street phenomenon, you can’t help but wonder how it’d be different if we too could learn a little bit from them. Turns out, it all starts with spotting the loopholes, big and small, and learning to use them to your advantage.
“What is a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?” someone asked on Ask Reddit, and the thread got people sharing how they managed to milk the system, to get away with things, to attain something that wasn’t theirs and so on and so forth. Read below for the most interesting stories!
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Had intermittent anemia in college that I was trying to improve. But the blood work was about $100 each time.
I started donating blood and if I was too low they’d turn me away and I’d keep trying to up my iron. If I was high enough, I got to donate to a good cause.
Win win!
Right out of college I worked a job that had a 100% match to any retirement contributions. I was young, lived rent free with my parents, Had no student debt, and could grab OT nearly every week. After some budgeting I figured I could throw 80% of my paycheck into retirement. I did so for 9 months until my supervisor called me into the office to sign a policy change that limited retirement contributions to 50%. I'd stashed away nearly $35,000 on about a ~$32,000 annual pay. I had no life for about a year, but damn if it didn't jump start my retirement.
Most young adults wouldn't have had the discipline to use their money so wisely. This was such great planning on your part!
I used to frequent a sandwich shop (they've since closed) that could be very busy at times due to how close it was to a convention hall. The process for ordering food was much like that of Subway: approach the counter, tell them what you want, you get to sit there and watch them construct your sandwich. They had room enough for three sandwich makers: two people behind the counter and one guy manning the back area for pick up orders. They almost always had a guy dedicated to the pickup window and during peak times he would help out, but his priority was phone orders. The window was marked "Pick up for phone orders only!"
There were many times (when the inside was packed with customers) where I would literally stand outside this window placing an order on my cell phone with the phone order guy laughing and shaking his head while he took my order and made my sandwich. I could see the customers in line inside and they could clearly see me.
One time, a customer in line got pissed and started complaining about me "cutting the line" and that I couldn't place my order at the window since it was for phone orders only. The guy behind the counter said that there wasn't anything wrong with what I did since I did place my order over the phone, I just happened to be standing at the window when I did it.
When I was at university, the pay-for campus printers all worked on a system where you'd print your documents, release them at the printer, they'd print, then after they've finished printing, it would then contact the server to get the cost deducted from your balance. That final step always took a while and I discovered in my first year that if I cancelled the print job as the final page was rolling out of the printer, it wouldn't deduct the cost from my balance. With this method I got free printing for nearly two years before they upgraded the system!
And they would've gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling system updates!
Not sure if it counts as a loophole, but I worked at a books/music/video store when I was in high school. We were supposed to remove the "in training" portion of our name tags after the first two weeks. I just left mine on so that customers wouldn't ask me questions. A full year of hardly anyone talking to me at work was the best full year of my life
Not me, but a friend of mine (among others I'd assume) managed to get an entire sales campaign cancelled that a bank in my country did.
IIRC the bank tried to promote one of their debit cards (which are basically prepaid credit cards) via some bonuses and gifts you'd get as customer, e.g. one of 20 products you can choose for free if you start using it etc.
One of these bonuses they offered was a small payback, you'd get after each purchase. What they did was basically rounding up the amount you paid (to full Euros) and give you the difference. So if you bought something for 27.63€ you'd get 37 cents gifted from this bank.
What he then did was only possible because we were university students back then, had very flexible work time and some of our friends were temping in super markets... he went to the super market our friends worked at at times when basically no one else was there and purchased hundreds of single potatoes. Each one = one purchase with the card. Depending on their weight each of these potatoes was like 2ct or 3ct, so for each purchase he got 98ct or 97ct gifted from the bank, making him profit about 94-96ct for each potato. He got about 250€ (plus an unreasonable amount of free potatoes) in 2 days with this until the bank called him like "uh... could you like maybe stop that...?" and he just shamelessly responded "why?" to which the bank person on the phone had no good answer. So then he just went on and made some more money until the whole incentive thing got completely cancelled a few days later.
Fun times.
I bought a card once for $10 that had 16 coupons for a BOGO pizza from Dominos. They were little stickers that you were supposed to pull off and hand in when using them, but they never asked for the stickers. They also didn't have an expiration on them. They also didn't tell anyone it was supposed to be one per order.
We'd order 8 pizzas at a time, used them for two years. Thousands of dollars of free pizza really help when you're a broke college kid.
In college there was a parking garage that charged around $2/hour. I couldn't get a parking pass but learned the heated garage that charged $2/hour had a $20 fee for a lost ticket. I would park my car in there for a few weeks at a time and when I had to leave would lose my ticket and be forced to pay the $20 lost ticket fee.
A parking pass was around $500 to park outside and I ended up paying around $300 in lost ticket fees to park in the heated garage.
Several years ago AT&T was running a trade-in promotion increasing the value of old iPhones way beyond what they were selling for on eBay/ CL at the time. This promo thankfully wasn’t bundled to a new phone purchase and could be done on any active line of service with AT&T - so no limits on phone trade-ins.
I ended up buying 31 old iPhone 4s for about $70 each on eBay and trading them all in to AT&T on promotion for $200. Worked out to $6200 in AT&T credits (got myself 2 iPads, a 2 new iPhones at the time, and enough of a credit on my bill I didn’t pay for cell phone service for almost 2 years).
I really miss this type of promotion!! 😭
When I was in college they had this deal where if you signed up for a free trial of Netflix you could get a $10 gift code for Papa John's.
They didn't even ask for a credit card back then, just an email, so I would just use make new email addresses and would get a code every time.
Not only did I get free Netflix for a while, but I also got a lot of free pizza.
Kroger used to have a thing where if you found something expired on their shelf, they would give you the expired item, and a fresh one for free. In college we would go to the local Kroger at midnight and hunt for expired stuff. Mainly ended up finding breads, other bakery items, meats and cheeses as those were the hardest items for them to keep track of. My roommates and I would walk out with a full cart of free food every week.
Was on a cruise ship a few years ago that had a pay-per-minute Internet policy. You’d buy like 200 minutes of wifi access for $100 or whatever crazy price it was. They had a little portal that you went to, to start and stop the timer, and tell you how much time was remaining.
I quickly realized that the timer counted by whole minutes. That is, if I started at 12:00:01, and stopped it at 12:00:58, then it counted as 0 minutes of internet use.
For the entire cruise I took advantage of this. Start the timer, fire up your internet apps like Facebook and Instagram and let your timeline and emails download, or launch a website and let it load. Stop the timer. Browse your feed and photos and read your website and emails offline, compose posts and replies etc. Start the timer again to send/upload, stop it again within a minute.
I milked those 200 minutes for an entire 3 week cruise and still had 45 minutes left over at the end.
My school had uniforms, it was kinda strict with those... but nowhere in the rules it stated that girls should wear the female uniform and boys the male uniform. Sooooooo, I bought the male one and wore it. A lot of teachers wanted to give me detention, but when I went over the school rule book and s**t, they had to stay steaming mad because I was not breaking any rules. They assumed it was implied, but the only think stated was that the uniform was to be worn properly, be clean and fit well, but that's it.
By the time I graduated, a lot of students were doing about the same s**t I was.
That rule changed shortly after my generation went off to university. sorry kiddos, maybe you will find new loopholes to give the inspector an aneurism
Sad they changed it. I never understood schools that are ridiculously strict about their uniforms. As long as everyone has roughly the same look, isn't the goal being accomplished?
When my brothers and I were 6-10 years old we found a crane candy game where you were “guaranteed to win” something. We found a laser sensor in the area where you pick up your prize. This indicated whether or not something had dropped. So, by holding the flap door open at the bottom the sensor was never triggered so for 25 cents we nearly emptied the machine. Thanks Red Robin!
Early in the smartphone world there was an app that gave you points for watching TV shows and ads that you could turn in for gift cards or discount codes.
The rewards were not great but over time and by waiting for gift card restock you could make out like a bandit. However, the shows they wanted you to watch were not my cup of tea (a lot of prime time shows and reality shows) and I wasn't home for a lot of them so I thought I was SOL. Turns out, the app had a grace period where if you had recorded the show on your TV you could still get credit, so I just pirated the shows and set my phone up to "watch" them while I did something else. Then I realized it only listened for about 2 minutes before it gave you credit so I was able to get through the log of shows in about 40 minutes and make a killing.
Because of that app I was able to get a kitchen aid stand mixer, a smoker and a bunch of other stuff because of the gift cards.
I was visiting a hospital on a daily basis for many weeks ( premature twin babies) but they didn't do multi-use discounts. "There's the hours you were here - pay up" type of thing. And it was costing something like £5 - £10 per day
Until a few days in I realised that the hospital had only recently appointed the car parking company and they haven't yet installed the "arrival time" machine at the car park entrance but had only put a temporary machine in the Hospital lobby . . . . which you were meant to use on your arrival.
And from that day on I got my "arrival time" ticket when I was leaving and only paid minimum stay.
Charging people everyday to go visit a close family member (including chosen families) in hospital should be a crime.
Carl’s Jr. app offered something like 10 points for “checking-in” each time you visited. Once you had 100 points you could get a free $6 burger
Well, I figured out the “checking-in” counted as long as your cell phone was within maybe 100 yards or so of the restaurant.
And I drive past a Carl’s Jr. right before my house
So I would check in on the way to work each morning and check in again on the way home
Free burger every 5 days
Then they changed it so 100 points was a BOGO instead but it was good while it lasted
Not really a loop hole I guess just a way I ripped Pizza Hut off for a couple thousand dollars in food and drinks. Back many years ago when places were just starting to set up their websites for online ordering I found a way to refresh the page the right way where I could enter a coupon code to take 10% off as many times as I wanted to. We did a practice order to make sure it worked. We did like a $30 dollar order and brought it down to like $7 and paid with a $20 and let the driver keep the change. Since it worked we started doing bigger and bigger orders. We would only get like 2 pizzas but we got lots of wings, deserts, cheese bread and drinks and other random side items. Our orders were coming out around $90 and we ordered every single day and many days twice. A couple of times the delivery guy said "your total is . . . . wait that can't be right . . . . $8?" We told him our uncle worked for corporate and gave us really awesome coupons and always tipped the driver really well. This went on for about 2 weeks of ordering at least $100 from Pizza Hut every single day. Some days we would order twice. All good things must come to an end though and one day it just stopped working. Some nights I lay awake tossing and turning thinking of how awful a thing I did to Pizza Hut . . . jk I regret nothing, it was awesome and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It was part of a great summer. We were tired of pizza after like 1 week but we kept on ordering just because we knew it wouldn't last forever.
My city council is offering 3 years of unlimited public transport throughout the 6 transportation areas (around 200km radius), if you give an old motorcycle or car to the city council for its destruction. They are doing this in order to reduce the amount of polluting cars on the road.
They do not require for the vehicle to be insured, to pass any certification or to work by the time you give it to them. As long as it's in one piece, they'll accept it. They'll even pick it up from wherever you leave it.
Bought 2 absolutely trashed motorbikes that were not even in use for around 350€, waited 6 months (minimum ownership period they require), then called the city council for pickup.
I should receive 2 unlimited transport cards in a couple of weeks (one for me and for my wife). As they last for 3 years, it'll come out for around 5.5€ /month. The equivalent 6 area month card goes for around 113€/month, so pretty good deal overall.
I worked at a restaurant in a hotel where you could collect "employee bucks" of sorts for going above and beyond at your job. You could use them to pay for things like a room stay or food in the hotel restaurant. They were worth a dollar each, but you obviously couldn't cash them in for real money.
I saved up about $450 worth, used $100 worth to pay for a hotel room on a day I was working, bought a soda from myself at the restaurant and tipped myself the extra ~$350 and signed it all to my room bill. Upon checkout it just shows that I spent $350 at the restaurant, not a breakdown of the bill. So then I used my employee bucks to pay off the hotel bill and got an extra $350 on my paycheck (minus taxes of course)
Coming to school 3 hours late. I found out that as long as you have a parent’s note, you could come in late unlimited times. The only restriction is that after 15 days missed for a class, you’d fail it. So, at the beginning of the year I pressured my guidance counselor to move my two study periods to period 1/2 and a blowoff class (which I didn’t need the credit for) to period 3.
Came to school at 10-10:30am every day my senior year opposed to 7am. Extra 3 hours of sleep, bringing fast food into lunch, and avoiding the hectic metal detectors made it well worth. Props to my grandma for writing 140 late notes for me at the start of the year. That my friends, is how you play the system.
Moviepass was $10 a month and you could use it to get 1 movie ticket a day. I lived next door to a Regal, and I went everyday because Regal would give their reward points for every ticket purchased. They didn’t care that Moviepass was paying for the tickets then giving them to me as part of my subscription. In 8 months I spent $80 on the subscription and saw everything that came out and I racked up enough Regal rewards points for about 50 free popcorns or drinks.
Moviepass went out of business but I still had all the Regal rewards.
This time of MoviePass was such an amazing phenomenon. I will never forget how many movies I watched in the theater. It's something I imagine one day telling my kids, "once upon a time there was this app that greatly underestimated the amount of money it would make and it let me watch all the movies I want for $10 a month."
At the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, Google had these tablets setup with quizzes about their products. The fastest time + the most correct answers would win a new several hundred dollar Tablet and some other goodies, each day.
I found a loophole/exploit that when you finish the quiz, you can just press the back button and take the quiz again. The questions and answers were in the same exact order this way. I memorized the location of the correct answers and would make an unbeatable time for the day.
I did this three days in a row, but after the first day, I put my co-workers names down, and won us all the tablets.
There was some other guy from Lockheed Martin that was pissed off at me because I didn't allow him or his friends to win. He was using a different exploit to get fast times, but his exploit made his questions randomize the order of the answers, which slowed him down.
I did not feel bad one bit. He was exploiting too, I just did it better. F**k him and his b******t posse he was with.
The employees at the booth did not care one bit. They were all contract workers.
If Google was smart, they should have offered you a job. You demonstrated the exact skills they needed at a conference where they should have been scouting.
I once bought a gorgeous, solid oak dresser with attached mirror accent that was priced at $1200 for only $1. I was on a website surfing for dressers for my newborn and came across a free shipping promotion. So I filtered results for dressers for the lowest priced item. Up pops this dresser for only $1. Upon further inspection I realized that the same dresser in other finishes were priced correctly at $1200. But this oak dresser was priced in error. I reluctantly added to my cart half expecting it to update the price... but it remained $1. Plus they had free shipping that day, so my cart total was $1.06. I completed the transaction and then called their CS number. I explained and was put on hold for almost 20 minutes. The woman came back and confirmed it was an error but that they had to honor the price. The page it was on went unavailable before I could let anyone else in on my find...
**An after thought to mention... freight shipping was normally $399 so it was a truly an amazing score.
« The woman came back and confirmed it was an error but that they had to honor the price » They legally do not. Not if the price is undeniably an error.
When Bank of America first offered it's keep the change program, I went to the gas station, pumped 5 cents, then restarted it over and over. I was there for an hour and made 300 bucks. They stopped matching 100% very shortly after.
1 Credit Card point for every dollar spent.
But up to 5X for every dollar spent abroad.
I've been on a 6 year "holiday" abroad and they haven't brought it up.
Before the pandemic hit, I used to sometimes go to Taco Bell between classes for a snack. One day I got a receipt with a code to fill up an online survey for a free taco on your next purchase (which is what I was buying anyways, since it was just a small snack). I decided I'd fill it up and buy a soda (which was cheaper) next time just for the free taco, thinking it wouldn't give me a new code, but it did.
Anyways, I started doing it so often that the employees started recognizing me, and one even told me "normally I tell customers to remember to fill out the survey, but I'm sure you'll remember."
In college my friends and I would do this at Burger King. There was also a pizza place nearby that did a promotion for a free pizza if you applied for their credit card or something, but they weren't doing it by computer, it was paperwork so we would just write fake information like Jessica R.Abbott or something else ridiculously absurd.
Years ago, Burger King sold mugs that you could refill for free any time at all. With soda or even shakes. My friends and I would bring a single mug, go in and get a chocolate shake, go back to the car to move the contents to another mug, go back in and repeat until all of us got free chocolate shakes. We did this regularly for about two years of high school.
I remember being young and going to Chuck E. Cheese. When you were pulling your tickets out, if you found this sweet spot then you could just keep pulling the tickets out. My mom had a hard time figuring out how I got 10,000 tickets in under an hour
In college, I had a full scholarship that paid for everything, including textbooks. All I had to do was show my scholarship coordinator the receipt for the purchased supplies, and she'd apply the credit to my tuition bill as a paid expense and I'd get reimbursed. I'm sure all of you know how expensive on-campus bookstores are compared to getting that same book on Amazon or Chegg. Like easily 30-40% more. My bookstore had a price-match program that would give you back the difference if you showed them the cheaper Amazon price online.
So I'd buy all my textbooks at the ridiculous bookstore price, using my credit card (getting cash back points btw). Take the receipt to scholarship coordinator, she'd credit the entire cost to my account, I'd be reimbursed in full. Then I'd go to the campus bookstore with proof of all the cheaper textbooks on Amazon, and they would credit me the difference I "paid" back on my card. I made roughly $300 a semester doing this.
Tldr: I made a profit in college buying textbooks, getting them reimbursed by my scholarship, then getting price-match credits back.
Years ago I would buy a few games at a time. Some of the games I'd play for a few hours before deciding I didn't like the game. Since the games were opened, the store I bought them from wouldn't take it back. HOWEVER, I learned that Walmart would exchange the game for you, no questions asked without opening the new game. So I'd go to Walmart to 'exchange' a defective game, take the new, unopened game to the store I originally bought it from and return it for full price. Oops.
We had a situation at my old job (a huge, international company) where we’d work shifts, either 8/10/12 hours. Anything after 8 hours was overtime.
Sometimes we were scheduled for the next shift quite soon after the last one had ended, for example 05:00-12:00 and then 19:00-00:00.
Someone discovered that if there were less than 8 hours between shifts in a 24-hour period, anything after 8 hours total was paid the overtime rate.
We did it for ages and then in the context of some team chat, some twat asked one of the managers whether the above scheduling would still be feasible.
Turned out the management hadn’t even noticed and stopped it immediately. And back to minimum wage we went.
Um. I think that is a legal requirement (not that I'm a labor law expert or anything), not just the company scheduling mess-up. At least in some US states, you work more than 8 hours in a 24 hour period you get overtime, doesn't matter if those 8+ hours aren't contiguous. Many businesses which operate in several states find it easier to apply the same pay rules across the entire company rather than spending time and effort to develop pay policies for each state (and deal with employees complaining about it being unfair people doing their exact same job get paid differently across some imaginary line).
The soda machine at a dorm I lived in had a weird glitch. If you put in five cents more than the asking price and pushed the product select button, the machine would empty all of its change out at once. We did this a few times and got $20-40 each time!
again this is unethical, you are probably depriving some small entrepreneur of his money. most of those machines are owned by individual guys.
Opened an Amex credit card and the introductory offer was 10% cash back in restaurants for the first year. I worked for a sh**ty chain restaurant as a server, so I would just stack a few of my large cash tables and put them on my card, then pay it off every week. Made
an extra $20-$30 a shift
Microsoft used to have (still might for all I know) online training for videogame retailers in order to train store employees on current and upcoming products that they could sell. The training gave points for each video and knowledge quiz you took, which could be exchanged for free games, computer hardware, store gift cards, etc.
By signing in under a random Gamestop store ID number (which was posted online), skipping the video, and brute forcing the knowledge quiz, was able to rack up a whole bunch of points and get several XBox games and simple computer hardware for essentially nothing.
Never worked a day of retail in my life.
Not me, but my dad. He was building a deck on their house. If the deck attaches to the house, you need a permit to build one in our city, since it's considered an addition/improvement. If the deck doesn't attach to the house, it's a free-standing structure, and you don't need a permit. So he built the deck right up against the house, but it doesn't actually attach to the house, so he didn't need a permit. All he had to do was add a few extra posts under the side of the deck nearest the house.
At wingstop, if you order on their website(for delivery or to pick up), you can order wings by preset amounts but they usually restrict you on how many flavors you can have so naturally, the more wings you order, the more flavors you can have. I usually get 15 wings; however, if you do this, they restrict you to 2 different flavors only. If you upgrade to 20 wings, you can have up to 3 flavors but 20 wings is too much for me. If you order 10 wings, it is still restricted to 2 flavors, but 10 wings is just not enough for me.
The thing is, I want 15 wings with 3 different flavors though(5 wings per flavor) so I can have a nice time eating my wings, and enjoy 3 different flavors. But clearly this option isn't available. My workaround is to order the 10 wings with two different flavors. But the last 5 wings? At the end of ordering before you checkout, they offer you the option to add 5 more wings of one flavor to your order, so I do this to get my 15 wings with 3 different flavors. All for the same price.
Nothing too profound lol. I just like taking my passport to Flavortown.
On Airbnb, some hosts allow you to change the date of the booking without any additional charges, (but would charge you if you cancelled the booking within certain hours) so if i had to cancel my booking without losing money i would change the date of my reservation to a month ahead of what it is currently and then in a couple of days cancel my reservation and get a full refund.
I just had to move my booking because my budget airline "rescheduled" my flight the day before so I'm against this person ruining it for everyone else.
I lived near a casino that would let you get chips using your credit card. I liked some if the show's and restaurants there but never gambled. So every time I went I'd charge $5K to my credit card for chips. Then I'd cash out at a different teller swing by the bank on the way home deposit the money and pay off my credit card. I did this maybe once a week.
Boom $5K of free points / cash back.
Worked for a Uber a while back. They had a promotion for drivers where they guaranteed you $20 an hour. The stipulation was that you had to average at least one ride per hour. I lived in an area that I would never get ride requests, but close to an area that was always busy and I would get requests for very short rides back to back. So, I would drive to this area, do like 10 quick rides within about 2 hours. Then I would head home and leave the app on for an additional 8 hours, not receiving any ride requests, and get paid for 10 hours. Basically, drive for 2 hours, make $200. This lasted a year before they changed the promotion rules.
I got screwed by Grubhub with their promotion similar to this. You could schedule blocks and if you worked the entire time and had a low rejection rate (I forget exactly what it was) but they guaranteed you $15 an hour. I used this exactly one time. I scheduled blocks all day and accepted every order that came through. Since my total money made for the day didn't equal $15 they paid me the difference. I think it ended up being like $80. A couple days later I can no longer schedule blocks because "I engaged in activity that has been known to be fraudulent " it gave me a chance to appe but as it didn't tell me what I did I really couldn't defend myself. They real kick in the pants is that I can still deliver for then, but I'm banned for life from scheduling, which makes me ineligible for the guaranteed $15 an hour.
This pizza place local to us had a glitch in their online ordering service for a while. You could technically combine 2 deals of 50% off. One was 50% off for any XL pizza of an order that was normally $30 or more, and the other was 50% off on a XL Pizza, with two 2-liter drinks, wings, and cheese fries at regular price.
If you put both of these coupons in, you only paid for the wings, cheese fries and pop which would be about $18. With delivery charge + tax it would be about $25. Plus 2 Extra Large Pizzas for literally free.
Normally this would be $70+. Any other coupon you could not combine, but this one worked together for some reason. For some other reason it would mark 50% off 2x on each pizza. We discovered this when we were ordering food the day we moved in. Feeding our friends that helped us move in. We thought it was a 1-time thing. Tried it a few weeks later and it worked. We did this at least once a month for the year or so we lived there.
We always gave the driver a $10-$20 tip and he knew what we were up to. The place never said anything about it for years. Eventually they updated their site a couple years ago, and we had moved out by then.
The Starbucks subsidiary Teavana (now out of business) would let you use your Starbucks rewards ("stars" or whatever they're called) to get loose tea by the ounce. However, there was an error in their point-of-sale system that only deducted 1 reward point, no matter how many you spent in a given transaction.
My wife and I spent 32 rewards on a couple pounds of the most expensive loose tea they had. She checked her rewards balance the next day, and holy s**t, she still had 31 reward points left.
So we drove to a different Teavana and got a bunch of loose tea from them, and then another, and then another. We were in Los Angeles, so there were a lot of Teavanas within driving distance.
At retail price, we took a thousand bucks or so of free tea off their hands before the loophole was closed.
There’s software that generates credit card numbers. Now you can’t actually buy anything with these numbers, because when the system tries to charge them, it gets rejected.
However, there was a website (like many others) that would give free amazon gift cards (via email) for trying out partnered subscription services that offered free trials.
You’d click the offer link, get redirected to the partner site, fill out all the information and use the fake number, and it would confirm on the offer site before getting rejected by the partner site. About a week later, you’d get a digital amazon giftcard in your inbox.
Got enough to buy a PS2. Long time ago, haha.
Sears has a program called Shop Your Way Rewards. They had some electronics items back in the day that would give you roughly the same amount of points back that the item cost. So a $40 pair of headphones would come with $30-$40 worth of the SYWR points. Well a group of enterprising folks found out how to generate as many coupons as we wanted and that $40 item became $25-$30 and the $30 in points became $40 by using coupons. You could also use points to pay for the item in question as long as you spent $0.01 in cash. So I was getting +$9.99 for every order placed. Sometimes it was order 5 of these things for $200, use 2 awesome coupons and you’d get back $250 for $160 in points spent on the items. I bought so much stuff from Sears over the course of 2 years. Made roughly $50,000 selling the junk electronics on amazon/eBay. And was able to stock up on craftsman tools, clothes, new appliances, and a couple of recliners using the points I acquired. I ended up on a first name basis with Shelley (or Sheila maybe?) the SYWR rep that ended up banning all of my accounts lol.
I used to have a Suntrust debit card that offered Delta Skymiles rewards with every purchase ($1 purchase = 1 Sky Mile). Walmart would let you buy a $1500 money order for 70 cents. I would drive around, buy $10000 worth of money orders, fill them out, deposit it into my bank account, and then buy more money orders. I would often have to call Walmart managers and ask them to refill the ATM machine with money orders.
I bought a few million dollars worth of money orders and got a few million Delta Skymiles that I've used to travel across the world that cost me almost nothing (time + gas + $0.70 money order fee). One day I got a random call from my bank asking "what's going on with all these transactions?". I didn't have a good answer and they presumably thought I was a drug dealer or money launderer and canceled my account.
The Skymiles are probably worth a few hundred thousand dollars. A few years later I applied for a credit card from Suntrust and I was rejected due to "previously unfavorable business relationship". I took that to mean they finally figured out what had happened.
The first three SimCity games:
* Build a modest-sized town
* Set tax rates to something high, but not high enough that it reduced the population
* Turn off disasters
* Set speed to super-fast
* Go to sleep
* Wake up a zillionaire
I used to just play the regular sims, but got all the hacks, I had this career generator thing that you could not only choose the career but it had how long per day you worked and for what amount per hour, so I would just work for 1 hour at 500,000 an hour, then I also had the baby painting that instantly gave you back all your energy at the front door. I also had hacks that made the drinking fountain make people frisky during a party, but when I got the pet add on, suddenly a dog drank from the fountain and was caught in bed with a party guest and I stopped playing, because things like that should not happen.
In college I worked at a dining hall with a parking deck right next to it. Parking pass would have been several hundred dollars a year, and to park in the deck without a pass would have been $10/day for the hours I would be at work and in class.
But it wasn’t automated, and the booth workers went home at 11pm, so after that they had to leave the gates open for residents to get in and out. Being a college kid, staying on campus until 11 was easily doable, so I parked for free for two years.
If they don't want to pay for round the clock people or installing automatic gates that take tickets that's on them I say
At my work, if you want to purchase more holidays they calculate the cost via what they pay you per day and then spread the total cost over a 12 month period to make the purchase easier for you. So if you buy 1 extra day and your rate is £50 a day, you only pay £4.16 a month for example.
If your pay increases the cost scales with it which gave me an idea.
I knew i was in for a pretty big payrise so I bought 10 holidays just before it happened and asked if I could pay for them upfront, they agreed but thought I was mad.
I got the payrise but all the holidays were paid for upfront on my old salary and they didn’t clock on so I saved about £400.
Noice.
When searching for sources on essays teachers warned not to use Wikipedia.
On the other hand,he said noting about Wikipedia's own sources.The final product is so different that not even an software can make find similarities.
idk… i’ve looked at wikipedia’s sources and not been able to find much useful information
Dating myself here, but in the late 80s, soda machines had just begun accepting dollar bills. You could take a bill and apply a piece of clear packing tape to it. Once the machine took the dollar, you could pull it back out using the tape. Free coke, but the best part was that you got change back! Paying you to drink a coke.
Whenever I don't meet the required criteria for free delivery, I just add anything, ANYTHING to my cart and checkout. And then cancel that extra product after placing the order and recieve full refund for it within an hour.
This also works with coupons which have minimum spending amount.
Note: before using this make sure to check the cancellation policy about cancellation charges.
One time I was at McDonalds with a friend and I got a McWrap for 2€, and I decided to try out filling out the survey at the bottom of the receipt for a free drink. I got my drink and to my surprise on the receipt I got for the drink there was another code for a survey, so I tried it again and it worked. We did it about 5 times until we decided to leave. The next day I decided to try it again and for some reason it didn’t work. A month ago I was at McDonalds but unfortunately didn’t work again.
At the neighborhood swimming pool there was a vending machine. If you held down the root beer button for awhile the machine would give you 2 root beers. Just needed to scrounge up 3 quarters... Miss those days.
on the 1965 payphones if you dropped a penny in and hit the plunger type coin return with the receiver at the right time, it would give you a dial tone.
In high school when I had a page count for an essay I would make the font size for periods, commas, apostrophes, etc. 2 numbers bigger than the essay text. In a decent sized essay it would tack on a page which was nice. For word count essays I would just make random words at the bottom and then make the text white. Didn’t work as well on online submissions like Turnitin
Lots of HS teachers now would be breathing down your neck for not formatting properly, even for just periods/commas. Not that they shouldn't - just unfortunate for slackers like me lol
The local Wendys had a survey on the back of their receipt that would get you one free burger of your choice with the purchase of any other "premium" burger.
They also had a special on where the Dave's classic single, considered a premium burger, was $2.
There was no specification that the free burger had to be "Of equal or lower value".
The first time I didn't even make a purchase, just went into the store, found a receipt near the garbage, filled out the survey, got my code, and then ordered their Asiago cheese chicken burger (their most expensive item) with a Dave's Single. 2 burgers for $2.
Then of course I had a receipt for that purchase, which lead to infinite $2 for 2 burger deals.
Doing something a bit similar - going to Mcdonalds, grab a receipt just to use the toilets and if I need some wi-fi or charge for my phone - can stay at some table with left unfinished order (not consuming it) just to look like regular customer "swimming" in his phone. I do respect Macdonalds for their bussiness model, but the palm oil in their products is a No for me
The Mc Cheapy.
McFlurries were like 4 bucks. All it is is ice cream in a cup with some shots of topping. They dont even mix it.
So we asked for a soft serve, 30c, two shots of toppings, $1, a cup and a spoon (free)
There was a local haunted house set up for Halloween in my hometown. It took place at a nature center, so was usually a big deal being in middle school and going out at *night* AND around spooky trees
One thing they did to help encourage folks to participate was have a vote for the spookiest encounter in said haunted house. My friends and I saw this poll on the haunted house website and thought it was utter b******t that the witches at the end of the house were getting all the points, when chainsaw guy was clearly the best.
Being a youth with limited computer time (home computers were starting to become more common, and I was limited to an hour of computer time after school), I got through what I needed to for homework and spent the rest of my time refreshing the page and voting for chainsaw guy, as there was no limit on how many times you could vote.
After a few days of this, I guess someone noticed just how many more votes chainsaw guy was getting, as chainsaw guy was easily 100+ points more than the witches, as I was only allowed to vote once more before it cut me off.
He still won, and I wonder if they know it's mostly because of a bored 12 year old
Domino's pizza Australia. When ordering online, delivery charge was added to the first pizza. So I'd buy garlic bread, hot chips, chicken wings, a drink and some deserts and skip the delivery fee by paying by card online. Kept it up for 2 years before they "updated their terms" and shut the loophole
There was a summer where I got free chipotle all the time. I had a gift card that had like 2 dollars left on it. I hadn't updated the app yet so it still had the "use my gift card and pay the rest in store". However either the computer at the store said I already paid the full amount ahead of time or I always came in during a time that they were swamped so no one ever asked me to pay. They also never charged my gift card. I got away with it until the app made me update it.
Mexico. Lays Chips.
I was 12 years old.
Every bag had a scratch it card.
Payout ranged from free sodas, chips, candies to cookies.
I shined a laser pointer under the card to figure out where to scratch the card in order to win.
Won every time.
Left a lotta room in my budget for sex, drugs and alcohol.
To respond to the last sentence… but you were 12? I know it’s a different culture, but… 12?
BART (local lightrail service in the Bay Area) has just started rolling out reusable cards that you could load money on instead of having to use the one-and-done tickets. BART works by buying a ticket for the exact amount you need to get from A station to B station, putting said ticket into the entrance booth, riding BART, and putting your ticket into the exit booth. Some distances are super expensive, upwards of $15-20 each way.
So when they first started allowing people to buy the reusable tickets, they didn’t associate any purchase fees with it and you could buy one at most BART stations. I bought one with $10 on it and wanted to take a trip to the financial district of SF, but I must’ve spaced out cuz I ended up in the Mission, which would’ve cost me over $10. At the time I just went through the station without thinking about the lack of funds to cover my ride and since the ticket worked, I just forgot about it until I checked the balance the next day and saw a negative balance.
This got me thinking...if BART allows for the reusable cards to have a negative balance, why not just buy several $2-3 cards and use those for long trips? Man I must’ve saved hundreds for the first few months it was working, but then they fixed it thanks to all the damn news media reporting it.
But if you have a negative balance, surely that just means that you owe them money? I don't get it
I worked guest services at a mall and had been there long enough that the name tags had changed from first & last name to just first name. But I never got the new one and never brought it up because who cares? Only two of us had the old style.
If we got a belligerent customer that demanded to see a manager, but no one else was around, I'd walk up and just my confidence (having been there for years) would calm them down. They'd take one look at my name tag, see the longer name, and think I was the manager.
I'd repeat what my newer coworker said and apologize for inconvenience due to company policy, they'd apologize and do whatever we suggested. If I or the other employee with the old tag weren't there, someone would fish out the supervisor's tag from the drawer and put it on, do the same thing.
Saved a lot of heartache, tears, and time. Confused the management team when they got a complaint/compliment card about a manager that didn't exist though. They usually just threw those out
But surely they would still been able to recognise the name of the employee from records of who worked at the store?
In high school if you missed a class period, at the end of the day an automated message would call your home phone for your parent to hear and leave a message about the classes you missed. "A student in your household in grade 11 was absent for the following periods: 2...4...5" or whatever you had missed. I skipped a lot sophomore and junior year but at the start of sophomore year after the message called my house a few times I tried to be a little more sneaky. My parents would always ask if I skipped and I would lie and say the teacher must have made a mistake or that the system must have picked the wrong student and called the wrong house. They believed me at first but I could tell they were starting to get suspicious.
One day I had a dentist appt and missed periods 1 and 2. My mom drove me so she knew I would miss my first 2 periods. Later that day when the message called it just said I missed 4th period. On that particular day I actually had gone to 4th period but since the message was supposed to call rehardless of whether or not your absence was excused, my parents completely lost faith in the message system after that day since it should have reported I missed periods 1 and 2, yet it didn't. After that I was able to skip whenever and blame the messages on bad technology. It turned out fine in the end as I graduated with a decent GPA.
Skipping school is a sign the teen is overwhelmed or needs a mental health break from it, and tbh parents and educators should be more accommodating and allow "hooky days" imo
If a stat holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, book the corresponding Monday or Friday off and have a 4-day weekend.
Never thought of it as a loophole to be exploited until a co-worker called it one as he filed a complaint with HR, saying I was using it to get more vacation time than him.
That’s not a loophole it’s just using your time advantageously. This is totally common at my work to the point where to keep it fair we rotate who gets to have it.
Used to go to the casino for a night out. My friend and I would go to the heavily subsidised gamblers restaurant at the back and get a really nice meal for $10. After which we would go to the sports betting room and play free billiards for an hour or two. The coffee machines made great hot chocolate (also free), so we availed ourselves of that service heavily. Once we were done, we would wander the floor of the pokies and usually find a few stray coins which we would place in the nearest machine and see what we could get. Never won anything, but it wasn't our money, so no loss. Then they took the billiards table away. Didn't seem worth it after that.
Not sure if it is still a thing but in Vegas and Monte Carlo they used to give me free drinks while I was gambling. (to anyone). I'm not a professional gambler or anything, just a tourist. But I think the idea was get you liquored up so you lose your money. . Many years before that - my step dad told me about a place that would give you free hot dogs if you were gambling. (depression times or whatever). He would play roulette and bet on both red and black so he'd always break even, but he was 'gambling' so he got the free food.
I've done similarly with swagbucks. Now they limit it a bunch more, but a few years ago when I used it a lot more often I'd pull up the ad videos either on phone or computer, mute it, and let it run while I watched tv/did chores/etc. I got a bunch of free stuff from Amazon with it (for a while amazon gift cards were cheaper than all others at the $5 rate, so I'd trade it in for a bunch of $5 GC until they built up enough to buy more. definitely made a few hundred dollars off it for the 6-8 months I used it consistently, virtually all by just letting it run silently while I did other stuff on another device. Now they cap the amount you can earn daily by video to some low amount
Loopholes 101 - look for specificity and then go around it.
I grew up in a “strict” house where we signed contracts at the beginning of every school year. This is where I learned to find loopholes in contracts for fun to test and exploit. Example from our contract:
Process for when you get home from school:
1) snack time - 30 minutes (1500-1530)
2) in room for homework from 1530-1700
3) dinner at 1800
4) chores after dinner
5) bedtime at 2030
Exceptions: if you have a job or play a sport that occurs within those hours.
This one was fun because it assumed I got home, if I didn’t get home then I wasn’t subject to any of this until I did.
Additionally the exception called for a sport or job. So from the age of 5 through 18 I played a sport and/or worked after school. Additionally part 2 of that process didn’t say you had to do your homework or that dinner was at the house. I simply made assumptions based on the rules and my parents would amend the contracts accordingly. As long as I could justify my action I was rarely punished for this; Just scolded and told to stop.
These contracts got pretty detailed by the time I was in high school.
I have asthma, nothing crazy but in high school I was able to fill out some paperwork with the nurses office related to my chronic illness. In short I was able to write my own excuses without a dr note and I would be able to write excuse notes for past absences. I think I raked up 20-40 excused absences my freshman year alone.
In England there’s a shop called Tesco’s, all year they sell terrys chocolate oranges, but at Christmas they raise the price and give it a discount to encourage people to buy them despite it being the same price. Last year there was a loophole with stacking sales, so when you bought a toothbrush and three chocolate oranges, they gave you 50p. Between all my shopping there I must have bought about seventy. I was going to give them as gifts, but they’re really good haha
At an anime convention I used to go to, parking at the convention center would cost like $80 for the weekend. And the attached hotels used valet parking, that also cost a lot. But we found that if you parked all weekend but “lost” your ticket, they’d only charge you the daily max of like $20.
We did this for several years before the convention center wised up and started not allowing lost tickets on the convention weekend. Though around the same time, we started using hotels not attached to the convention center so there was other close parking available.
Not sure if it's a loophole but I was remoting in from home to work because of COVID. Since I'm salary I don't log in or submit a time card. Instead they require all employees (hourly or salary) to log in on Skype so they can track how long you're online. Except that they didn't disable the settings so I have my status remain "Available" for 20 minutes of inactivity so I can take 50 minute lunches and not get docked for it.
This isn't something I did, but this a pretty good story for this thread.
This guy owned a pizza shop which was eat-in and takeout only - no delivery. But he would occasionally get calls from people complaining about their food after placing an order for delivery. After some investigation, he had found that Doordash had listed his restaurant without bothering to ask for permission.
In looking at the listing though, he realized that one of the prices on the site was wrong - they were selling a pizza for only $16 that he charged $24 for. So he just started ordering huge amounts of that pizza, because with each one, Doordash was paying him more than they were charging him. And since he owned the store and didn't care about eating the pizza, he just started delivering himself plain dough to save on costs to make even more of a profit with each one.
I do not even understand how this is possible, door dash drivers do not turn up and order the food, so how was the ordering of the food done so that the store actually made the product, also how were they paying him at all, if he did not sign up and had no affiliation with him, then they were taking 24 dollars off customers, delivering goodness knows what, and he didn't get paid at all, until he suddenly started scamming them ? I am confused
I worked at a place where you could request any day off with pay according to what you had accrued.
We would ask for a day off with pay and then work our regular scheduled day off.
6 days paid. Work 5.
Anything over 40 was OT.
Few of us did this for years before management did the math.
When I was a kid and we used real mail, I figured out if you reverse the addresses, you don't need a stamp. The postal service will just "send it back" to the return address. Haven't bought stamps in over 20 years!
I had to stop reading. A few were interesting and clever, but I saw some that were just plain stealing and/or fraud.
I'm gonna get downvoted for this but what a bunch of thieves and cheats. Taking advantage of employers, retailers, and restaurants and then celebrating because they got away with it. I just can't imagine doing what these folks did and not feeling intense guilt.
I'm a company owner. Sometimes you just want to offer something nice to your customers as token of appreciation for their business. Sure enough, there is always somebody who tries to 'max out their benefits'. Result: instead of a general offer available to all, I now hand-select the customers. "Hey, you've been our customer for so long, i see you ordered this xyz service (we're in accounting and taxes) - how about I don't send you an invoice for it".
Just a small note: vending machines are often serviced by independent contractors who buy the products from the company and then sell them through the machine. So if you cheat a vending machine, you're not stealing from "Pepsi," for example, but from some independent contractor who has a very small profit margin.
What a bunch of crooks! I don't care how poor you think you are compared to others, you are still a thief!
Also an exBIL who, I agree here, had a big premeditated plan to steal big screen TVs. The massive ones. He would order them online from the companies directly. Then report they were damaged upon arrival. The companies did not want to pay to ship them back so he was told to just dispose of them and was given a refund. There was one in every room of their house. Nothing wrong with them at all.
I loved the college kids who got free or cheap parking and the others along those lines. But driving all over town to get thousands of dollars worth of tea! Why? Those weren't poor people, otherwise they'd not bought expensive looseleaf tea in the first place... tea has a shelf life, there's a limit to how much of that you can drink. That gig definitely got the person fired who came up with the marketing idea. Or stealing all the money and the sodas out of a vending machine: that's some small guy who invested everything he could borrow in a group of 10 vending machines. Getting robbed while still paying for gas and restocking: his family went hungry that week. I wish people had some compassion. Figuring out how to get free pizzas and repeating that several times: awesome! But to keep doing it to where it has to hurt the business: why?! I can smile about the ones that took a small profit margin from Walmart, since they treat their workers and communities terrible. But some hurt to read!
Most of these people are taking advantage of loopholes in a system. The loopholes are there. If the companies didn't leave the loopholes there would be nothing to exploit. However, putting tape on a dollar bill to remove it from the vending machine is theft, pure and simple.
Not me but a coworker used her MC to get free airline miles. I have no idea if this still works or not. We were teachers. Didn't make a lot of money especially for vacations. Instead of using the MC to pay out items she could not afford or for emergency expenses she funneled everything through her card. Gas, groceries, everything. Always paid it off by the end of the month to avoid the interest. In doing so she racked up a huge amount of miles. She took a weekend get away vacation once a month. Called them her mental health days. Leave Friday after school. Be back Sunday evening.
Another movie related “loophole”: Our local movie theaters have kiosks you can use to purchase tickets. My 16 year old daughter admitted she’d purchase rated R (17+) tickets at the kiosk, because she wasn’t carded. Apparently, the movie theater employees didn’t bother to card beyond the ticket sales point.
When things started opening back up again during the pandemic, movie theaters required you to select & buy seats online. They automatically blocked off 2 seats on either side of your party, to allow for 6ft/2m of social distancing. Every other row was blocked off to allow for the same kind of distancing front to back. There were 8 seats/row. A friend of mine took me to see Tenet for my birthday. I was a bit concerned about spending that much time around people I didn’t know, even if they were 6 ft away. He assured me he booked the whole row just for us. I took that to mean he bought extra seats. No! He bought seats 3 & 6. Sneaky! So, selecting seat 3 meant 1 & 2 were blocked off & seats 4 & 5 were blocked off. Selecting seat 6 blocked of the remaining seats 7 & 8. And we had the whole row to ourselves! (At most, with the current system, 4 people could have been sat per row. Ex: Seats 1 & 2 are taken by a couple. 3 & 4 are empty. 5 & 6 are taken by another couple. 7 & 8 are empty.)
I was kinda forced into this, didn't do it on my own initiative. Basically in my country, once you turn 18, your contribution to health and social starts. Of you work, deducted from wage. If student, state is contributing until you start working. It's limited to age of 25, by when most idiots would be either out of school with degree or just out of it. My last year at university, I received letter that since I turn 25 that year, state will no longer contribute and I have to start paying on my own. I had some odd jobs, mostly just a pocket money. Not enough to cover those. So I went on around various state department to explain I cannot start contributing since I'm still a student. Finally they came with answer - I could claim social assistance support from state, and they will be contributing to those institutions. Basically government wanted me to pay 15€ a month, and at the end they paid me 60€ plus those 15€.
Back in the day, I was attending university abroad and we found a payphone that would allow you to accept collect calls. I'd use the operator from that phone and call collect to my parents who would decline the call, hang up and immediately use an operator on their end to call me back at the pay phone number where I would accept a collect call from them.
A grocery store has a rewards system used for saving gas. I figured out that if you have $1 savings coming, if you push the buttons at the same time in either side of the gas pump, you can get the $1 off both cars.
Kroger has a baseline of double fuel points for all their gift cards, but at least every few weeks there will also be more points when you buy certain gift cards. Or a discount when buying certain gift cards (5-10$ off). I buy as many restaurant gift cards each month as I need to save the largest amount on gas ($1.25). Lots of them only need to be $15. And I eat there anyway.
To avoid the cost involved in shipping pennies overseas AAFES, the Army & Air Force Exchange System, does not use them overseas. .. All prices are rounded up or down to the nearest nickel. This includes the prices at the gas pumps, even when using a credit card (or at lest it did in the 90s, things may have changed). So by very carefully ensuring your purchase was $X.01, or $X.02 you could stick it to the man 2 cents at a time.
Mine was Rita's Italian ice. They had QR codes that you could scan with your phone and get point toward a free ice. After 5 you'd get a free one. I realized all you had to do was take a picture of the code and print it out. I kept a copy in my car and scanned it every day when I drove past my local one. They have since changed the procedure. Bummer. Free Rita's for like 3 years..
Years ago Wells Fargo had a deal if you waited in line more than 5 minutes they would credit your account $5. I went in one Friday payday at lunchtime. There was a long line and only 3 tellers working. After timing it for 5 minutes I announced to the line that they had been waiting over 5 minutes, don’t forget to ask for your $5. Everyone did and the tellers and manager were pissed at me. When I came in the next payday, they had canceled this policy.
No, I don't think they are cheats or thieves. I'm not a law expert here but... I believe that anybody, presented with the same loopholes would most likely take advantage of them as the circumstances presented. Most of them were ingeniously done, albeit surreptitiously! 😂
I had to stop reading. A few were interesting and clever, but I saw some that were just plain stealing and/or fraud.
I'm gonna get downvoted for this but what a bunch of thieves and cheats. Taking advantage of employers, retailers, and restaurants and then celebrating because they got away with it. I just can't imagine doing what these folks did and not feeling intense guilt.
I'm a company owner. Sometimes you just want to offer something nice to your customers as token of appreciation for their business. Sure enough, there is always somebody who tries to 'max out their benefits'. Result: instead of a general offer available to all, I now hand-select the customers. "Hey, you've been our customer for so long, i see you ordered this xyz service (we're in accounting and taxes) - how about I don't send you an invoice for it".
Just a small note: vending machines are often serviced by independent contractors who buy the products from the company and then sell them through the machine. So if you cheat a vending machine, you're not stealing from "Pepsi," for example, but from some independent contractor who has a very small profit margin.
What a bunch of crooks! I don't care how poor you think you are compared to others, you are still a thief!
Also an exBIL who, I agree here, had a big premeditated plan to steal big screen TVs. The massive ones. He would order them online from the companies directly. Then report they were damaged upon arrival. The companies did not want to pay to ship them back so he was told to just dispose of them and was given a refund. There was one in every room of their house. Nothing wrong with them at all.
I loved the college kids who got free or cheap parking and the others along those lines. But driving all over town to get thousands of dollars worth of tea! Why? Those weren't poor people, otherwise they'd not bought expensive looseleaf tea in the first place... tea has a shelf life, there's a limit to how much of that you can drink. That gig definitely got the person fired who came up with the marketing idea. Or stealing all the money and the sodas out of a vending machine: that's some small guy who invested everything he could borrow in a group of 10 vending machines. Getting robbed while still paying for gas and restocking: his family went hungry that week. I wish people had some compassion. Figuring out how to get free pizzas and repeating that several times: awesome! But to keep doing it to where it has to hurt the business: why?! I can smile about the ones that took a small profit margin from Walmart, since they treat their workers and communities terrible. But some hurt to read!
Most of these people are taking advantage of loopholes in a system. The loopholes are there. If the companies didn't leave the loopholes there would be nothing to exploit. However, putting tape on a dollar bill to remove it from the vending machine is theft, pure and simple.
Not me but a coworker used her MC to get free airline miles. I have no idea if this still works or not. We were teachers. Didn't make a lot of money especially for vacations. Instead of using the MC to pay out items she could not afford or for emergency expenses she funneled everything through her card. Gas, groceries, everything. Always paid it off by the end of the month to avoid the interest. In doing so she racked up a huge amount of miles. She took a weekend get away vacation once a month. Called them her mental health days. Leave Friday after school. Be back Sunday evening.
Another movie related “loophole”: Our local movie theaters have kiosks you can use to purchase tickets. My 16 year old daughter admitted she’d purchase rated R (17+) tickets at the kiosk, because she wasn’t carded. Apparently, the movie theater employees didn’t bother to card beyond the ticket sales point.
When things started opening back up again during the pandemic, movie theaters required you to select & buy seats online. They automatically blocked off 2 seats on either side of your party, to allow for 6ft/2m of social distancing. Every other row was blocked off to allow for the same kind of distancing front to back. There were 8 seats/row. A friend of mine took me to see Tenet for my birthday. I was a bit concerned about spending that much time around people I didn’t know, even if they were 6 ft away. He assured me he booked the whole row just for us. I took that to mean he bought extra seats. No! He bought seats 3 & 6. Sneaky! So, selecting seat 3 meant 1 & 2 were blocked off & seats 4 & 5 were blocked off. Selecting seat 6 blocked of the remaining seats 7 & 8. And we had the whole row to ourselves! (At most, with the current system, 4 people could have been sat per row. Ex: Seats 1 & 2 are taken by a couple. 3 & 4 are empty. 5 & 6 are taken by another couple. 7 & 8 are empty.)
I was kinda forced into this, didn't do it on my own initiative. Basically in my country, once you turn 18, your contribution to health and social starts. Of you work, deducted from wage. If student, state is contributing until you start working. It's limited to age of 25, by when most idiots would be either out of school with degree or just out of it. My last year at university, I received letter that since I turn 25 that year, state will no longer contribute and I have to start paying on my own. I had some odd jobs, mostly just a pocket money. Not enough to cover those. So I went on around various state department to explain I cannot start contributing since I'm still a student. Finally they came with answer - I could claim social assistance support from state, and they will be contributing to those institutions. Basically government wanted me to pay 15€ a month, and at the end they paid me 60€ plus those 15€.
Back in the day, I was attending university abroad and we found a payphone that would allow you to accept collect calls. I'd use the operator from that phone and call collect to my parents who would decline the call, hang up and immediately use an operator on their end to call me back at the pay phone number where I would accept a collect call from them.
A grocery store has a rewards system used for saving gas. I figured out that if you have $1 savings coming, if you push the buttons at the same time in either side of the gas pump, you can get the $1 off both cars.
Kroger has a baseline of double fuel points for all their gift cards, but at least every few weeks there will also be more points when you buy certain gift cards. Or a discount when buying certain gift cards (5-10$ off). I buy as many restaurant gift cards each month as I need to save the largest amount on gas ($1.25). Lots of them only need to be $15. And I eat there anyway.
To avoid the cost involved in shipping pennies overseas AAFES, the Army & Air Force Exchange System, does not use them overseas. .. All prices are rounded up or down to the nearest nickel. This includes the prices at the gas pumps, even when using a credit card (or at lest it did in the 90s, things may have changed). So by very carefully ensuring your purchase was $X.01, or $X.02 you could stick it to the man 2 cents at a time.
Mine was Rita's Italian ice. They had QR codes that you could scan with your phone and get point toward a free ice. After 5 you'd get a free one. I realized all you had to do was take a picture of the code and print it out. I kept a copy in my car and scanned it every day when I drove past my local one. They have since changed the procedure. Bummer. Free Rita's for like 3 years..
Years ago Wells Fargo had a deal if you waited in line more than 5 minutes they would credit your account $5. I went in one Friday payday at lunchtime. There was a long line and only 3 tellers working. After timing it for 5 minutes I announced to the line that they had been waiting over 5 minutes, don’t forget to ask for your $5. Everyone did and the tellers and manager were pissed at me. When I came in the next payday, they had canceled this policy.
No, I don't think they are cheats or thieves. I'm not a law expert here but... I believe that anybody, presented with the same loopholes would most likely take advantage of them as the circumstances presented. Most of them were ingeniously done, albeit surreptitiously! 😂
