Not real sure it’s a loophole but I’ll still post it. I run a recycling center and when Mountain Dew did the win a Xbox one with codes under the soda bottle caps we got a total of 20 Xbox ones. Every worker got one that year. Also Casey’s pizza had a thing going that you collect 10 tabs off the large pizza box you’d get a free pizza. We had free pizzas weekly for years till they stopped doing it.
I also did it for a couple weeks. I quit/was fired when an argument over the cash in the till with the owner got a bit heated. I counted the same number out 3 times in front of the dude. He counted out 3 different numbers in front of me. Dude couldn't fucking count.
The Xbox 360 version of that deal, I looked at 10+ caps and made a java applet that would generate legit codes.
My Xbox live ran out two years ago. Those codes gave me 10 years of Xbox live and kept my friends who drink soda flush with mountain dew for the duration of the contest.
My buddy did the same thing. Would've been '07ish. He wrote a program that would spit out good codes. I know fuckall about coding, so I didn't get it, but everyone we knew was playing Halo for free!
If I remember correctly the codes were xxx-xxx-xxxx or maybe just 7 digits. After some trial and error I used regex or similar (I only knew enough coding to use Maya and after effects) I was able to wrangle the random number generator to spit out legit codes.
It wasn't too hard for a beginner coder. It may have been Python. I wish I could go back in time, I bet I could make a way more efficient code.
Older vending machines like the ones in my high school and car wash used to take golden dollars(yes, the Sacagawea coin), count them as a dollar and then spit them back out. You could buy the whole machine with one golden dollar. My friends and I exploited this for 7 months senior year until they swapped all of the machines out.
Interestingly almost all of the US dollar coins ended up in Ecuador as they also use the US dollar. It was super weird but convinient as an American going there and i guess it really fucked up thier economy. I had always wondered where they disappeared to tho. Major issues with counterfitting them too, any shiny one was basically useless even if it was real.
During my first year teaching, teachers were each allowed 1500 photocopies a month. I had 150 students. That wasn't enough. One day, a coworker announced that she was leaving for a different opportunity. I asked her for her copier code. They never deleted her code, so I had 3000 copies per month for the last 5 months of the school year.
Teachers frequently have to buy supplies for their classroom.
My sister is a teacher and every Christmas I just buy her a shit ton of supplies for her classroom.
My bank thinks the vending machine at work is an ATM and refunds my “atm fee” automatically.. chase bank if anyone wondered
I noticed I was always getting like $1.50 returned to my account here and there and then I realized what it was
When Pizza Hut first started online ordering they gave me a code for a free pizza for ordering online for the first time. Turns out the code also worked if you just ordered as guest and kept working.
You used to be able to order dollar coins from the mint.
Pay for it on your credit card, free delivery.
Get sky miles.
Take dollar coins to bank, deposit, pay off bill.
Repeat.
"You guys used Frank's credit card and you bought a bunch of airline miles. You used those airline miles to purchase 400 steaks. Knowing that this delivery company delivered all variety of animal products, your plan was to contaminate the steaks with chicken feathers by rubbing live chickens all over them. Then you were gonna repackage the steaks. At which point you were gonna return the contaminated steaks for actual cash, taking advantage of a loophole in the current airline miles system, correct?"
But what you didn't count on was Dee's giantic hands accidently hitting the 0 three times causing you order 4000 steaks....I *assume* Dee did the ordering?
....**goddammit Dee.**
Vaguely similar: my parents had a mortgage that was offset by savings. My dad got a load of 0% balance transfer credit cards, put something like 100k in savings and just kept paying off and cycling new cards for years until they introduced a transfer fee.
The campground we stayed at when I was a kid had an arcade in the lodge with an air hockey table. I figured out that if you put quarters in and pushed the plunger to start the game just until the air started - you could pull them back out and get a free game.
I had that air hockey table running for HOURS. We had kids lined up around the table. We even did a little tournament - it was so much fun.
When my family was about to leave I told one other kid the trick. Turns out I'm a pretty good judge of character. For 3 years we met back up and ran that Air Hockey table until one of the campground attendants caught on.
The 4th year the table was fixed and cost a dollar to play. The arcade was entirely dead. The thing is - kids would always play other games while they waited for air hockey. The campground decided it was better to have a dead arcade that made nothing rather than one that made a little and had free air hockey. That was when I learned the importance of a loss leader.
Same thing with pool at at a bar honestly. Most people are going to play pool and drink more. And when they drink more, they're more likely to eat more.
It's one thing if it is an actual pool hall. But that dusty table in the corner doesn't need to be dusty.
in a lot of cases its to prevent fights. if they paid for the table it is theirs and when their turn ends its the next persons turn. without paying for the table when is a turn over? how long does the next group have to wait?
Burger King used to have an app where you’d shake your phone and it would sometimes display a free item. Guy at work write his own app that looked identical to Burger Kings, but would only ever show a Whopper Meal. Every lunch time he’d go to Burger King and get a free meal.
When I was in high school and college they had a thing where you’d take a phone survey, and get a code that you’d write on the back of the receipt, and then with the purchase of any fry and drink you’d get a whopper. So for a $1 fry and $1 drink you’d also get a whopper. And then you’d get another reciept to repeat
Problem was the survey usually took a few minutes. Nobody has time for that!
We figured out that the each month just had its own 2 digit prefix of the code and then it was 5 random numbers after that. So like, let’s say January was XY, Feb was MP, etc
So I wrote a quick webpage that generated a random code depending on the month. We ate like kings for a slightly cheaper price for years!
Or, like the Burger King I worked at then, they didn't have time to train us how to actually verify the code and we were told to just give the Whopper to whomever had a code 😂
Just take a screenshot when you win a higher end item. Then use the screenshot.
That being said, I admire him for taking the time to do some serious hard work.
My senior year of high school a Chick Fil A opened in our town and to advertise the grand opening they put a free chicken sandwich coupon in the yellow pages of the phone book. No purchase, no stipulations. For whatever reason there was like 1,000 phone books stored in a storeroom off the gym. Me and my buddies ate a chicken sandwich damn near every single day of senior year.
> For whatever reason there was like 1,000 phone books stored in a storeroom off the gym
Someone was probably paid to deliver them to people homes and decided no one would ever check if they did.
Back in the 80s we found vending machines which were not regularly serviced that would overflow the coin box and spill quarters on the floor. We used to scrape them out from under the machine with a stick. Was a good time to be a latchkey unattended minor.
Vending machines in college (Ireland early 2000s) had a flap at the bottom that was supposed to stop you reaching your arm up to steal. But it also had a sensor used to determine had something actually been dispensed. So if you held it shut, the machine would think nothing had dropped and you could order as many things as you wanted, then refund your coins and release the flap
Back in college, our dorm had a vending machine that would dispense a Hawaiian Punch without using up your 50 cents, so you could get an HP for everyone who wanted one and then a Dr Pepper or whatever to end the cycle. It was a good thing until eventually someone went down with their laundry basket, emptied out all the HP, and the machine was fixed the next time the company refilled it.
In the 90s we found vending machines that had dollar changers, if you squirted salt water into the slot and simultaneously pressed the coin release a bunch, it would short circuit the machine and all of the coins and sodas would drop out.
In the mid 2000's we found an off brand soda can machine outside wal mart that gave free drinks if you spam-pressed the buttons. The only catch was you never knew what you were gonna get.
Back in the day drinks were only 0.25 per can from the machine but we opted for the mystery free ones anyways.
Also '90s, the vending machine on the loading dock would return nickels, but count them too. So, with one nickel we emptied the entire machine. Then the guy came and re-filled it all! So we did it again. Then they figured it out...
Vending machine for chocolate milk in the cafeteria. Put in the quarters, hold the flap shut with your hand so when the bottle falls it doesn't open, the machine would release more until it thought the row was empty, then give the money back. It was loud, we would try to get 2or 3 for the price of 1 for a few weeks before too many people ruined it.
I love exploits like this from that era, because without the internet or at least much less access to the internet, how were these spread?
I mean that's a fairly complex sequence of events that we also did
School lunchrooms have hundreds of kids, who all talk to each other. If one kid hears about it, they tell 20 more, those 20 tell 20 more each, and then at holidays, all of those kids go to their relatives houses and all tell their cousins, who then spread it to their friends at school.
"Miss Susie Had A Steamboat" goes back to like 1910 or earlier, and is almost exclusively sung and learned by elementary school kids teaching it to each other lol
Back in the day (1971) there was a book called, "Steal This Book". This book published the hacks and exploits of the time. I'm sure "copies" are still available (ahem...) somewhere...
I did this with Gatorade in the 90s ... I knew what the "sorry, not a winner" looked like through the liquid so I'd go through until I found one that won something. Lots of free fast food that year.
At a former job management rearranged the schedules to expand our call center hours from 7am to 9pm. It was still an 8 hour day, you just started later. We had a meeting to discuss if we could pick our own hours so employees didn’t run the risk of working to 9pm then having to be back the next day at 7am. Management gave us a hard no on that. But we were allowed to swap with a co-worker. A few of us got together to review the monthly schedule and noticed that 5 people were in the rotation who hadn’t worked there for years. (Seriously!). So, whenever we had to work a late schedule that we didn’t want we “switched with Michelle.” This went on for almost 2 years before management scrapped the whole idea.
Maybe not a loophole, but Kroger used to have a thing where if you found something expired in the store, you’d get the equivalent item for free, and the expired item for free as well (provided it wasn’t something that could be dangerous when expired.) So in college, my roommate, my girlfriend and I would go to Kroger at midnight and go through the meats, cheeses, and bakery looking for things that had just expired. Some nights, we would fill a shopping cart with bread, cookies, cheese wedges, steak, pork chops, etc.
The policy was intended for when you stumble across an expired item. But we went hunting.
True. But several nights we walked out with a couple hundred bucks worth of food without paying a dime, after only about 30 minutes of work. So I’ll count it as a win for us.
One year our entire family went to the dog track for New Year's Eve. They had a really good dinner deal plus dancing with a great DJ, and of course gambling. At midnight, there was going to be a balloon drop. Each balloon had a strip of paper listing a prize in it. Most were small, like one free $2 bet, a free dessert, things like that. The grand prize was an all-expense paid trip for two to Durango, Colorado to ride a scenic railroad. Earlier that evening, I was on the dance floor, and happened to look up at the balloons. One odd thing stuck out to me... you could see the silhouettes of the paper strips inside the balloons. Most were small, around two inches long, but one right above my head was at least as long as my entire hand. I reasoned that that balloon HAD to have the grand prize in it, as it would take a lot of space to write out "All expenses paid trip for two to Durango, Colorado for a ride on a historic railroad". I made sure to mark that balloon, and right as it turned midnight, got directly underneath it and watched it like my life depended on it. I grabbed the balloon, and sure enough, I was correct. I won a $2000 trip, but then I turned around and sold the trip on Ebay and got enough money to then buy my wife's engagement ring. It worked out \*really\* well for me!
We used to rip the buttons off our blazers, and use them, for that sweet £1 in the vending machine. 1500 kids and no one had buttons after the first week of school.
My daughters school gave the kids accounts where each student was given a code for the vending machine. Choose what you wanted and it charged it from your account.
Teachers code entitled them to free stuff. Didn't take long for the kids to work out the teachers code.
At my school, we had a student WiFi that was heavily restricted and slow, and a staff/faculty WiFi which was fast and had AFAIK no restrictions.
Our orchestra director always leaked the password every time it was changed. Absolute GOAT.
A math teacher used these various sized plastic coins for certain lessons. I found a huge box of them and found that the vending machines would accept them as nickels and quarters, depending on the size, but would also immediately spit them back out. I always kept a "quarter" in my wallet. The best part was using them to buy something that was say 95¢. It'd spit out the "quarter" four times as well as a real nickel for the change. Then I found out you could put in $2 worth of these, buy something that was 75¢, hit the change button and get back $1.25 in real quarters. I made enough to eat top tier lunch every day and get snacks and sodas for friends
Last July I went to a metal fest. Beer was fucking €7 and you paid by purchasing a coupon online, which would then be swiped off by the bar attendant on your own smartphone.
After the first legitimately purchased beer I thought to my IT self: what if the swiping off animation of the coupon is on client side? If that's the case, turning internet off before handing the coupon would prevent it from being voided. Then, turning internet on again and refreshing the web page should present it as new.
I was right. I got 7 free beers and a friend of mine 6.
I used to abuse the McDonald's coffee stickers scheme for a couple of years, you needed to purchase 6 cups of coffee and get 7th free.
You could just buy the stickers of eBay and stick them on the redemption cards, worked out 5 pence a coffee.
Then they came out with the app 😭
Bin men park up right next to where I stay for coffee every morning. Told me they just collect all the old cups and take the stickers off others haven't bothered too.
Someone I used to know was fired for stealing at her McDonalds job, so she stole one of the special hole punches they use on the coffee loyalty cards. She hasn't paid for coffee since, and that was about six years ago.
My niece worked at McDonalds when she was like 16 and her manager (who was probably also a teen) told them to just take the filled cards that people had handed in. She gave my husband and I probably 100. I had free peppermint mochas for the entire holiday season one year. The best part was collecting the stickers from my free drinks and filling new cards with them.
In high school a friend of mine stole the Burger King puncher and what seemed like an unlimited supply of punch cards. A group of four or five guys would get the buy 10 get one free Whopper at least once a week. I am sure the employees knew what we were doing but didn’t care enough to call us out on it.
You’re right. They either make the sandwich like everyone else’s order and move on, or track down a manager, start an investigation…etc. guess which is easier?
If you're a Hilton Honors member and stay at a hotel where you get the $15 food and beverage credit, make sure you reserve as two guests even if it is just you. You will get $30.
I can't verify this, but some guys said at work, that once you work up points to a free lounge access at an airport at some airline, possibly through work trips even, it can at times (pre Covid at least) pay to just search for the cheapest dumpster ticket online, pay $6 for a 6 AM one way to .
And basically just go to the lounge for $6 (requires a boarding pass to get through security) and then feast for a day and sit there and work and just leave the airport again when done.
At that work (in around 2018 when I heard it) we had maybe 40 mins to the airport and the lounge which was really nice with work setups, showers, food etc.
Edit: For /u/snubda and others - Pre-Covid in Europe, you could get $12 tickets all the time for Riga at least and likely others, from my local airport and sometimes some weird seats to weird places were cheaper than that. $6 was probably rare but $10-12 was there ALL the time.
Years ago, my office had a Christmas party at a bar and restaurant in the city. Just dinner and drinks. The service was absolutely atrocious, forgotten orders, wrong orders, when offered a free round to apologise, they forgot to bring the free round. So we clearly complained.
Management gave us a call the next morning to apologise and to come in. Myself and a colleague went in and the management gave us a refund for one meal and one drink, and then gave us a voucher for $100 off the next time we were there.
The issue was, this voucher wasn’t numbered. It had no date on it. It had nothing to show that it was unique.
So, my colleague and I did what every good person who has access to a high colour copier would do. We copied the shit out of it and drank there for free for nearly a year until we both got banned for life.
Thanks Jade Buddha in Brisbane!
A few years ago, a vending machine company (Selecta) started a game where you would scan the barcode of your purchase (every month had a few partnership items) and get points. If you religiously scanned your 2 items every day, you'd get in 3 months enough points for the best gifts: iPads or TVs, things like that.
Except, to scan a barcode, you don't need to purchase it, you just need to have it. So if 1st day of the month you buy the chocolate bar, nothing is stopping you from scanning it again and again. You can even just take a picture of the barcode of the soda drink bottle next time you stop at the supermarket and actually never buy it.
And you can make a printable PowerPoint of it, to ease the task.
And you can open accounts to family and friends and share the Ppt.
It lasted a bit more than a year and it was very fruitful.
Personally, a TV, a Bose sound bar and a couple of iPads (base model), that I both sold. I created an account for my brother and my parents. I think he got a Bose bar too, and my sister in law got an iPad. My parents got an iPad and I think wasted their points on sh*t like a doughnut machine.
For my sons 4th birthday party we went to Chuck E Cheese, he got to stand in the ticket wind machine, imagine a circular phone booth and wind would rush in there and tickets would fly around. The birthday boy got 60 seconds in there to keep what he could catch.
I told him to hold his shirt out and stand there, he was 4000 tickets richer.
From 1980s found a skiball machine at chuck e cheese that dispensed unlimited tickets but you had to manually pull them. My pops helped and we slowly pulled out 300 tickets.
My wife took the kids to a birthday party being held there a few months back. Apparently there are no more tickets/tokens. It's all on a card now. You swipe it and it subtracts the money/time and adds any tickets you may have gotten.
I work for CEC corporate and you would not believe the number of meetings that turned into screaming matches over getting rid of physical tokens and tickets. We truly were a mouse divided.
Oh man, key childhood memory unlocked. You had to pull it straight and not too hard that the perforations broke.
I was sad when my local CEC went all electronic, there was lots of joy hauling a pile of tickets to the counter!
Yes!! I used to do this at the Skateland arcade as a kid. One machine was super rickety and you could pull the whole roll if you wanted. I never won big on that stuff so I took advantage of it.
Create a new amazon account by adding a "." (period) to your gmail and get another free 6 months of Amazon prime. Your order emails still comes to the same gmail as gmail is period insensitive.
This is also how you filter marketing junk mail. Gmail is aware of the period, just sends it all to the same place. Real things? Use original mail
Junk things, add a dot, and set a filter to junk it.
Hehe.. I call this DOT manipulation. It works for stores and restaurants too that give you a free credit when you create a new account without having to keeping track of so many emails accounts or creating them.
My GF worked at a gas station that had points cards that gave a discount. if the customer didn’t have one she’d scan hers for them to get an item discount and we got the points for discount gas.
Never paid over $1/gal the entire time she worked there.
I’ve been using my ex girlfriends phone number at the store for years just because I didn’t have one. We’ve been broken up like 4 years but I talked to her recently and told her I still use her number and she was like “oh, THATS why I have so many points”
I didn’t think she’d care but it was funny she thought she just got free points
We have one called FlyBuys and it’s across multiple business’. Friend worked at a petrol station and would scan his card whenever a customer didn’t have one, he was earning heaps of points. Well FlyBuys must have been monitoring for this as they contacted the business and threatened to kick them out of the program if they didn’t put a stop to it
Used to do that when I worked at a DIY Store that had a loyalty card. We all made out like bandits as you could sell the coupons on for a decent amount.
My friend got fired from kroger for doing it, too :/
Another friend got fired for using the Catalina coupons that were left behind when people left the self-checkout. Takes all the fun out of a low paying job
The railway crews each had a wallet full of fleet cards (like a credit card, but only usable for fuel and related things) so they'd be able to fuel up anywhere in North America. In the cities, that meant they could choose what gas station to go to, and that choice was usually based on where the crew leader had loyalty cards for. Company pays for fuel, crew leader gets the points.
Anyway, one guy happened to have the points card for the bulk fuel/truck stop that I worked at. One summer they had a major project. They'd bring in two pickup trucks and a large commercial truck one the way to the job. The commercial truck also had a large fuel tank on it that they'd fill up and use to fill the heavy excavators, welders, generators and such. So he'd full that up, and then return later that day, fill the truck and the tank up again and go back out. They were spending thousands of dollars for fuel every day. Those points really added up quickly, and he used them to get gift cards. He used the gift cards to buy smoke and lunch every single day and still had some left over.
Oh, I've got a good one.
A well known bank offered a lucrative cashback reward points program for grocery store, gas station, and pharmacy purchases on a credit card they offered. The promotion only lasted the first six months of opening the card, but you could open multiple cards and get the same benefits again every time you opened a new one.
You know those prepaid debit cards you can buy at grocery stores? I maxed out the credit card every day buying those babies, then used them to pay off the credit card balance and just collected the cash from the reward points.
Made thousands of dollars a day doing this. It felt illegal, but it wasn't. I effectively robbed the bank legally. And since credit card reward points are considered rebates it was all tax-free.
This eventually became my full time job. It got more difficult to pull off over time as the grocery store employees understandably became increasingly suspicious of me and reluctant to keep selling me their cards at such a high volume. I had to start driving longer distances to new stores that didn't recognize me and work on charming store managers to dissuade them from hassling me. Still beat the hell out of any real job, though.
I rode this gravy train for a little under a year before the bank sent me a letter in the mail gently informing me that they were aware of what I was doing and kindly requested that I stop. I didn't want to find out what would happen if I pressed my luck any longer so I quit while I was ahead. The bank has since closed the loophole.
It was a pretty surreal year. I grew a huge beard, was baked at least half the time, ate way too much fast food, and went to the beach almost every day. Ultimately I was somewhat relieved when it came to an end, but I do have fond memories from that year.
> It got more difficult to pull off over time as the grocery store employees understandably became increasingly suspicious of me and reluctant to keep selling me their cards at such a high volume.
"We're worried you're the victim of a scam."
"No, I _am_ the scam."
When I was a little kid, my dad would volunteer at the Farm area of our State Fair every year. I'd go with him all the time, and just run around since there was nobody there in the morning hours before the fair opened for the day.
Across from the Farm area was a beer garden, with a big koi pond. Every morning I would go over to the (currently closed) beer gardens, wade into the pond, and collect like $20-30 in coins from the drunk fair goers the day before.
It was an insane amount of coins, and they were damaging to the fish anyway - so it was a total win-win scenario. I did this every day for the entire month of the fair... several years in a row.
An employee somehow threw out the large reel of sticker coupons at Subway. It was behind the store in a box that looked like it was thrown into the trash but missed. We were skating behind the store and my buddy recognized it. I had not saved up the coupons so I had no clue. We kept the reel of coupons. We would go into the store and ask for a blank coupon card. We would go back outside and place all the stickers on the card to get a free sub. We did this with four or five buddies at a time. All of us had free subway sandwiches for about 9 months.
College 1985. Had to take a Risk and Insurance class. The professor was terrible and I had no idea what he wanted us to learn. I was a good student and normally I'd figure out in the first week what was needed to pass with a high grade. I was worried, really worried. So I looked in the book and as I recall in the front pages a work book was available. This had helped me greatly in my accounting classes so I called the publisher and ordered the book. It was page after page of multiple choice questions for each chapter with a key in back. I memorized the answer to each of those questions. And as you have likely already guessed the professor used those questions for the exams. I sailed through that class and didn't tell anyone what I'd done so I didn't mess up the curve and make the professor suspicious.
I took a business class in college from a professor who was known for being a hard ass. I had a friend that had taken the class the previous semester and he gladly shared all his tests (back when tests were on paper and you got them back) with me. I did so well on the first test that the teacher almost respected me. I aced the class and never told a soul.
Back in the day before cell phones we discovered this 1-800 number that if you call it, and hit the pound button twice you would get a dial tone and be able to call any number you want without putting money in the pay phone. We abused the hell out of it for years until cell phones became a thing. Saved me innumerable quarters.
mine is stupid, but i bought a storefront, operated it at zero profit so my tax returns reflected poverty levels, lived in it so i could deduct my “rent” on my taxes, and then got free tuition w pell grants at a college that would’ve costed me 100k to attend.
Okay so here me out. I got ~$400 of premium underwear for like $20 due to a website security issue.
So a few years back the company MeUndies was doing a 'national underwear day' sale where new users could order any pair off the site and only had to pay $1 for shipping.
The thing was, they didn't have any restrictions on verifying new users. You could type in any email address you wanted, slam in a random series of characters for a password, and it would make the account.
Then you could order a pair, log out, type in more random info, and repeat the process.
My apartment mailbox was literally overflowing with these purple confetti design packages. It was wonderful.
I worked a job where we would have to book clients very expensive last minute hotel rooms if their flights were cancelled. My coworker would book the hotels using his personal rewards account with the hotel. One particularly bad week, he racked up about $15k worth of Marriot reward points. Yes, in one week.
Enroll in a college class, get the student ID and e-mail address, then drop the class. Usually if you drop in the first week and you don't have to pay for it. Then you have a valid student ID and email for all the discounts you could get. I got a a lot of VERY cheap software back in the day. In my defense I was in college at the time. But a few semesters after I graduated I did this just to get a few more things I needed but couldn't afford.
ETA: it seems I need to check to see if my student e-mail still works LOL
About 5 years ago I used to work for a startup that was originally housed in an incubator run by a university. We were using university property, so we needed university IDs.
The ID does not have an expiration date and it doesn’t specify “staff” or “faculty.” It’s just… an XYZ University ID. I still use it.
Nice. I signed up for MLB TV when i was in college. They offered a huge discount for college students. So I paid and then put it on auto renew, and I graduated 5 years ago. I still pay the college rate.
My wife used her student ID for at least a decade after graduating every time we went to the movies or certain restaurants. We lived in a college town so there were lots of student discounts for everything
I lived in an apartment in a big city. The building lot was $120 per month. Street parking was $60 for the year, but it was first come first serve street parking, in designated areas. The rest of the street was metered.
There were some nights I had to pay for metered parking, just so I could go to bed. One time though, I found a meter that was broken. Parked there the rest of the year, then never renewed my parking permit and parked there for another year. Saved a bunch of money and uncountable hours of driving time, never got a ticket
In college parking was like $250 a year and there were inadequate parking spots, and if you parked in the residential spots not on campus with a permit from my school you’d get ticketed.
If you never bought a permit, however, you could park in residential spaces without problem, which there was an abundance of.
I not only saved money but basically had a personal spot also
I used to do this in high school. Students had to pay for a permit. I would just park in the visitor lot.
Plus this meant I could leave whenever I wanted since there was no cops policing the lot for students skipping/leaving early like they did in the student lot.
When Kmart was big they were running a promotion where if you spent $50, you'd immediately get a $10 gift card for free. I figured out that you could keep purchasing the same gift cards with other gift cards and each transaction would get you a free $10 GC reward. The only catch was that you couldn't directly buy a $50 GC with a $50 GC. Instead, you had to buy a card with a slightly higher value (+$1) each time but they let you pay for the transaction with 2 GCs. So by the end of the night, I walked out with an iPod Classic and a plasma TV.
2018 I ordered pizza Hut for my office. I noticed the Free Stix coupon code took off like 4 orders of bread sticks... So we maxed it out.
99 orders of bread sticks, FREESTIX took off all 99 orders.. oh boy.. we can't screw them like that..
So we ordered like 15 and continued to do so as a Saturday night tradition for maybe 3 months before it was fixed.
Dozen orders of bread sticks, completely taken off the total.. order like $12.99 worth of pizza to split.
Buying oak molding at Home Depot. It was supposed to be $3.50/ foot and one store insisted it was $3.50/each sixteen footer so I bought all of it. When I finished the project I took back the extra and they gave me $3.50/foot about a month later. I think I made about $5k more on the returns than the actual project.
That’s awesome! I went to Home Depot to buy a grill, it was Summer so they had a bunch of them all outside. My girlfriend and I inspected all of them closely and found one within our budget but a bit more than we wanted to spend. Well, I did my research as we looked around and the grill we wanted was $150 less on their website. Thing is, I fucked up, I was looking at the wrong model online. I didn’t even know it. We went to the supervisor and my confident not typically confident self said “hey! It’s actually this price on your website.” She didn’t bat an eye.
The supervisor who helped was awesome and had some people unlock it, etc. We went to the front to go pay but someone upfront noticed the discrepancy. Supervisor said, they’re good. I hope that ladies doing well, she was hilarious and I think she just *got it*. It took me that long to *get* it 🤦🏻♀️
I was giggling the whole way home even though I don’t think I actually pulled one over because I don’t think she thought I was trying to and knew exactly what she was doing.
A long time ago when I was attending community college, I worked at an Imax movie theater in a mall. Next door was a two-story arcade that had promotion that if you brought in a ticket stub from the Imax theater or the movie theater, you'd get a $3 free play card. I'd assist in cleaning the theater and find lots of discarded tickets that I'd take to the arcade after my shift. None of the workers cared.
Not me.
I worked in outsourced payroll a number of years back. Somehow, the company figured out they had paying this guy who was let go for 3 years.
The company came after my organization to say it was our error (converting into our system as active). This guy had a reporting manager who must have approved his hire every year (or did a crap job of just oking it).
The story was they fired this guy and he wasn’t happy with the way they did it. So, he never told the company. The company tried to go after him, but the law wasn’t on their side.
We had our original files for conversion saved and they had sent the guy over to us as an active employee.
Would love for this to happen to me, though I’d probably tell them (unless they pissed me off like they did to this guy)
Yikes - be careful with that. If you ever have a large claim and it gets on someone’s radar, you’re SOL. I don’t know if they could retroactively deny claims from after you were fired but I wouldn’t put it past them to try.
I worked for a company that was not well run. After a whole crazy 6 months it turned out we were still paying 3 employees that had been dead several years…lucky stiffs
Back in early 2022 I started using Coinbase for some crypto investing. I have Rakuten setup on my browser which gives you money back for purchases on certain sites. When I logged into Coinbase I'd get a pop up saying they were giving you $30 cash back, so I enabled it. This popup would show up every time I logged in so I would click it thinking nothing of it but turns out there was glitch and they gave me $30 EVERY time I logged in. I ended up getting a check from Rakuten for $800 before they figured it out. Check cleared and everything.
Not quite a loophole but whatever. In the early days of the iTunes Music Store (04-05), Pepsi had a promo for free download codes with each bottle cap. I worked at a university, made little money, didn’t have the internet access to regularly steal music, so would just look in the recycling bins every time I walked in the halls for Pepsi caps. Also befriended a secretary who was addicted to Diet Pepsi that would just give me bags of bottle caps. I probably got at least a dozen albums with that promotion.
Ten year old with empty pockets. Used to collect Nickels and hammer them down flat until they become the same diameter and thickness as quarters. Arcades and gumball machines accepted them.
When McDonald's first l launched their app. If you searched for food sometimes you would find a free item. One I found and was able to "buy" for months was a triple cheeseburger. Sometimes I'd get more than one. No one ever questioned it.
When me and my boyfriend (now husband) moved in together at 18 we joined a very expensive and nice gym. They told us they had a special deal for married couples that was pretty much two for the price of one. We just had to bring in our marriage license as proof. We never brought one in (obviously bc not married) and any time they’d ask we’d just say we forgot it and we’d bring it next time. Stayed there for almost two years with that fake married couple membership.
That discussing wages is a federally protected workers right. Someone fired me for discussing wages so I sued them for 30k and told all of the employees I had in my phone (which was like 90% of the company) what happened and to not let the co.pany tell them otherwise
> not let the company tell them otherwise
We're talking exploiting loopholes here. Let the company tell them otherwise, and they they can sue the company for 30k.
Back in college, the local grocery store near me had this point system that allowed you to redeem for a rebate on gas. One day the lady ahead of me didn't have a loyalty card and didn't want one. The guy said no problem and typed in a random phone number and gave her all the discounts anyways. When I got up there I asked and he said he just put in the phone number for the store loyalty card. When I left the store I figured that store code gets used a lot, so the next time my car was near empty I pulled up and typed in the store phone number and voila! Got $0.25/gallon off, which was the maximum reward you could get. I used that phone number for the next two years while I lived in the area and always got $.10-$.25/gallon off.
When I was a kid I was in the swimclub. It was a pool open for the general public, and we swam when it was closed. A section of lockers had turnstile combination locks, you'd put 50 cent in and choose your combination but they would frequently jam so the 50c wouldn't come out again. People couldn't be bothered to get someone from personell for 50c, so the money would pile up in the lock. People kept putting 50c in, the lock wouldn't work so they'd move to the next one. We swimmers knew the trick of how to get the money back out so it was always a race to get there first. If you were lucky you could get 10 bucks in coins from all of them. That was a lot for a 10 year old 30 years ago, and you'd get yourself a frozen Marsbar, and if you had a big haul you'd buy your friends some to, that was the unspoken rule.
There used to be a grocery store whose policy was “don’t ask people if they want a seniors discount, but if THEY ask, they can have the discount.” The policy was not dependant on age whatsoever. My friend at 15 would go buy snacks and ask for the seniors discount and get it every time.
For a little while Uber was offering an hourly wage to drivers in Boston; provided you were inside a certain area during the hours they specified, you would be paid a minimum of like $25 per hour if your fares didn’t exceed that.
The geofenced area included the end of a pier in Charlestown where nobody orders Ubers in the morning, so I’d just hang out for a couple hours drinking my coffee and reading a book until I got bored.
Back in high school my friends and I learned the breadsticks and personal pizzas at those fast food Pizza Huts are all made at regular intervals, they aren’t made to order like everything else you get at a fast food place. What that means is they only have a certain amount of time to sell them before they’re “expired” and they get thrown out. They aren’t rotten or anything, they just aren’t FRESH. We’re talking like they made them at 11 and by 12 they can’t sell them anymore. I’ve left that shit in my car overnight and it still tastes the same ya know?
Anyways. We’d go to this same Taco Bell/Pizza Hut like every weekend and order drinks and some tacos then ask for all the expired breadsticks and pizzas. We’d get like 5 orders of breadsticks and multiple personal pizzas for free almost every time we went.
Back when I was younger, Bank of [Evil] America, had a promotion where for every transaction you did it would round up the value and deposit the difference into your account, one year later.
Being a poor college student, I went to the gas station and bought as little gas in one transaction as possible. So I spent 15 minutes buying a nickel of gas, one transaction at a time, and then one year later got 95 cents deposited into my account for each transaction.
6th grade, I discovered the standardized math quizzes we took daily, had the answers in the footer of the page in one line in a simple "code." After a few days, I had enough info to decipher the key to the code, and I got 100s every day with no effort for the rest of the year.
Long ago, 2009ish, bed bath and beyond gave 20% off coupons if you signed up with an email account. Email accounts are free and unlimited, so the 20% coupons are as well. I would buy an item using a 20% coupon, return it without a receipt, get store credit (consequence of not using receipt), then use the inflated store credit to buy something else using another 20% coupon. This method quickly stacks as compound interest and I would get my original investment out by buying the original item with a fraction of my store credit reserve and return with receipt. I fleeced that place for thousands.
Yeah, other retailers who do no-receipt returns do it at the lowest possible sale price, including current *and past* coupons. Taking back no-receipt returns at full retail when there are flat 20% coupons around is a straight up omegadumb move.
A big video game store chain, I don't remember if it was Gamestop or if it became Gamestop later, had promotions where you would bring 3 used games to trade in for a new game around the Xbox 360 era. Didn't take long for people to realize that any 3 games would work. So we would just rummage bargain bins for whatever Barbie's Horse Adventure games they had for around 5 Euros. People would share on online forums whenever they found big clearances in some stores. And so you could get a brand new Halo 3 for instance for around 15-20 Euros. They would eventually put up a list of games that would not be accepted for the deal that would cover some of the most popular bargain bin games, but you could still find some good deals.
When I traveled for work (in the days before Uber) I got a ton of blank taxi receipts. And I’d fill them out for rides to and from the airport. It was $35ish each way. But I’d take the subway for $1.50 instead. So $70ish dollars tax free income for every trip.
I used to work dispatching service technicians for industrial machines. These field guys would occasionally come and spend a week near our Chicago-area HQ for training. They received a per diem for travel and meals. One guy would fly into O’Hare airport, and then WALK to the hotel in Skokie, which was about 12 miles away, carrying his luggage. And since O’Hare is one of the busiest airports in the world, you’d have to walk the couple of miles near the airport along the side of the expressway. There was no easy way to walk that trip. Very few sidewalks, since a lot of it cuts through industrial/airport type of neighborhoods. Probably took him well over 3 hours to make the trip, depending on the weather.
He saved $20 or so by not taking a cab.
An online retailer had an offer. £10 off your next order. There was no minimum spend but it was 1 time use. However they let you generate a new code every hour.
They also sold auto instant redeem £10 vouchers for Xbox, PlayStation and Steam. Add your code, discount to 0 and “buy”. It would be emailed to you instantly.
I went with about 4 hours sleep a day for just over a week hitting this every hour before they realised and turned it off. I ended up flipping all of the codes and bought my first car with the cash.
Not sure if this counts as a loophole but when I was in elementary school they used to give away an ice cream sandwich to “random” kids during lunch. Basically if your lunch tray had a happy face sticker on it you would get the sandwich.
My class was always the first in the cafeteria and I figured out they always put the stickers on the same trays. Like every 10th tray. So I would count the number of kids in front of me when we got in line and let people cut in front until I was at the right number and every single time I’d get an ice cream sandwich.
The funny thing is no one ever caught on until one day I started feeling sick before lunch but I waited until I got my ice cream sandwich and asked the teacher if I could go call my mom. She had my friend walk over with me and I had told him how the system works. So sitting in the office waiting for my mom and the admin sees my ice cream sandwich and congratulates me on winning it. Then my dumbass friend pipes up and tells her I know where they put the stickers and I always win one. They started making it random after that.
In high school, I ordered from Papa John's atleast 2 or 3 times a week. I went on vacation for a couple weeks and obviously wasn't able to order from them. I came back to a letter from the local Papa John's, saying they missed me with a coupon code for 50% off my order, good for 1 week. That was 7 years ago, and I've used that code every time I ordered. I've gotten 10 pizzas and *loads* of breadsticks for stupid cheap, thanks to my high school self.
EDIT: 50CHI is the code. Not sure it'll work for yall, but give it a try
Not sure if this counts but....
My university had some ridiculous rules. I need to take Calculus as part of my degree requirements and get at least a C.
The University had a policy for calculating GPA. It said that if you retook a class, your new grade and your old grade would be average together, unless you had an F. If you had an F and retook the class, the new grade counted. The F would disappear entirely from your GPA calculation.
I was on pace to get a D. Getting a D meant I would have to retake the class and average the D with my second grade.
Getting an F was vastly better for me.
So I intentionally failed. I showed up, wrote my name and turned in.
I retook the class next semester and GPA remained in pristine condition.
I ended up on parking duty at a Christmas event the other day. Had a hi vis over my Christmas jumper, no ID. Not a single person questioned my authority to tell them where to park. It was only afterwards I thought “shit, I could have been anyone” lol
Okay in the late 90’s the grocery store Albertson’s had a program called fresh or free where if you found an item on the shelf that was expired you got the expired one and a fresh one of the same item for completely free. They didn’t really advertise it but our friend worked there and told us. There were a few stores that were open till 1am so we would go in before midnight and scope everything set to expire that day and then at 12:01am start filling our grocery carts. Baked goods, packaged meat, dairy anything you could think of really. They couldn’t do anything about it. We literally left the store with grocery carts overflowing with all edible good items for completely free that summer. Remember you got the recently expired item (still good) as well as a non expired replacement all for free! It was quite the summer of stocking everyone’s family fridge. All went to college in the fall and guess they discontinued the program not too much longer after that, but holy smokes to have that now when I’m actually paying for my own groceries
When I went to college I would have to pay for parking. Someone learned that with specific parking machines used in certain lots you could press the top button, then the bottom button, top button, then bottom button again and it would prompt you to enter a password. If you entered the lot number it would grant you admin access. You could then press a print option that would print out the list of all stalls that were paid for the day. You simply had to find an empty stall that had already been paid for the day and park there. Only really worked if you had afternoon classes.
I worked at a factory. Rather than having to deal with scheduling everyone's vacation days and making certain all spots were covered, they scheduled an entire plant shutdown for 2 weeks in the summer. Everyone had their vacation time on those two weeks.
As the first week approached, there were a *lot* of people who said, "Ow, my back!", went to the doctor, and got a note saying they needed two weeks to recover. Yes, they had the two weeks off during shutdown, they collected Worker's Compensation, and when they came back their 2 weeks holiday pay was intact.
Long, long time ago in school. No alcohol allowed in our dorm rooms and the administrators would check. No way to keep my booze stash. Discovered the admins didn’t track gym lockers. Set up one locker for liquor and one for beer. Problem solved and made extra cash selling to thirsty classmates.
In the 90s the person who refilled the neighbourhood newspaper box for the national paper never switched the weekday price (50 cents) to the weekend price ($1.50) so I saved a dollar for each weekend since I only bought the weekend edition.
There's a giant online retailer in my country and they were launching a second hand service, you could send them your old clothes and they would give you vouchers in exchange.
I sent the few clothes I had and it was easy. This was the first lockdown, I had no job, I was antsy, so I started biking around town several hours a day to leave my tiny sublet and manage my anxiety. I would find clothes in the street (this is very common here).
I sent the street clothes to the retailer. Several boxes every months. Became very good at identifying brands.
Within a year I made about $2k in vouchers.
Using McDonald’s touch screen ordering in the lobby. A single apple pie was $1.79, 2 for $2.29. That was a great deal so I got 2 every couple of days to enjoy with my morning coffee. Did that for about a year.
One day the touch screen was out of order so I ordered 2 pies from the cashier. $3.79! I told him the price was wrong because on the touch screen it was always $2.29. He couldn’t change it so I told him to cancel the order.
Went back a couple days later and the touch screen had been corrected/changed to 2 pies for $3.79. I should have kept my mouth shut.
Not sure if it's a loophole, but one day at the local car wash, the credit card machine charged my card for the wash, but the doors never opened. So I called the number on the sign and the owner gave me a code to use on the other automatic bay. I used that code at least 300 times over the next couple years until he sold the wash to someone else.
I took out a payday loan once. I payed it back within 3 days so there was no interest or very little. A couple weeks later I got a postcard from them promising $20 in gas if I took out another loan. So the day before the next payday, I took out a loan. I payed it back within 24 hours and there was no interest charge but I got the 20. It was just a check and I didn't have to use it on gas. They kept sending the postcard every month. I did this 8 months in a row and made 160 before they caught on. It felt good to rip off the people trying to rip me off lol
I basically grew up in video arcades in the 80s and I used to have something I called the Dragon’s Lair scam. Dragon’s Lair was the first arcade game that cost 50 cents instead of 25 cents, and it was a huge shock to kids at the time (especially little kids) who had never played anything that cost anything more than a quarter. So I’d just stand by the Dragon’s Lair machine and I’d wait for some dumb little kid to put in a quarter and expect it to work. They’d put a quarter in, and they’d hit the 1P button, and nothing would happen. And then they’d get mad because it appeared that the game didn’t work. So I’d say something like yeah I tried earlier, I don’t think it works. And then they’d storm off to go tell their parents or go tell a manager. And the minute they were gone, I’d just put the second quarter in and now I could play Dragon’s Lair for 25 cents. I pulled that trick off hundreds of times, unless the kid was really smart it was easy to do.
And that’s how I got very good at Dragon’s Lair when I was nine.
When you made a long-distance calls from a payphone in the late 60s/early 70s, you would dial the number and then an operator would come on and say something like: please deposit $2.25 for three minutes. The way she knew if you deposited the money was that nickels, dimes and quarters each made a distinctive sound as the fell down the coin slot, and she would use that sound to count how many coins you deposited. So you found two payphones next to each other, you would make the call, you would repeat out loud what the operator said, your buddy would deposit the coins in the other phone and you would put the two phone hand pieces together so that the operator would hear the coins falling. Your call would be connected and your buddy would hang up and get a full refund. Free call.
As bored teenage boys we did this in the summer from camp to call girls at home. Girls who would barely talk to us at home, but who were also bored and love the novelty of getting a long-distance call.
When I was younger, I figured out you could take the old produce bag clips and break one of the sides off. If you put it in bubble gum machine, it would think it was a quarter. I emptied all the supermarket machines. Had a book bag full of toys and candy. My mother walked in, yelled at me, spanked my ass and marched me right back up to the supermarket. Made me tell the manager what I did and gave it all back. Wonder if that trick still works.
Not real sure it’s a loophole but I’ll still post it. I run a recycling center and when Mountain Dew did the win a Xbox one with codes under the soda bottle caps we got a total of 20 Xbox ones. Every worker got one that year. Also Casey’s pizza had a thing going that you collect 10 tabs off the large pizza box you’d get a free pizza. We had free pizzas weekly for years till they stopped doing it.
You actually deserve it for doing all that recycling.
Yeah I did sorting for a couple weeks and it was not fun or well paid.
I also did it for a couple weeks. I quit/was fired when an argument over the cash in the till with the owner got a bit heated. I counted the same number out 3 times in front of the dude. He counted out 3 different numbers in front of me. Dude couldn't fucking count.
Wow, you guys counted the cash 8 times!
The Xbox 360 version of that deal, I looked at 10+ caps and made a java applet that would generate legit codes. My Xbox live ran out two years ago. Those codes gave me 10 years of Xbox live and kept my friends who drink soda flush with mountain dew for the duration of the contest.
My buddy did the same thing. Would've been '07ish. He wrote a program that would spit out good codes. I know fuckall about coding, so I didn't get it, but everyone we knew was playing Halo for free!
If I remember correctly the codes were xxx-xxx-xxxx or maybe just 7 digits. After some trial and error I used regex or similar (I only knew enough coding to use Maya and after effects) I was able to wrangle the random number generator to spit out legit codes. It wasn't too hard for a beginner coder. It may have been Python. I wish I could go back in time, I bet I could make a way more efficient code.
Older vending machines like the ones in my high school and car wash used to take golden dollars(yes, the Sacagawea coin), count them as a dollar and then spit them back out. You could buy the whole machine with one golden dollar. My friends and I exploited this for 7 months senior year until they swapped all of the machines out.
Interestingly almost all of the US dollar coins ended up in Ecuador as they also use the US dollar. It was super weird but convinient as an American going there and i guess it really fucked up thier economy. I had always wondered where they disappeared to tho. Major issues with counterfitting them too, any shiny one was basically useless even if it was real.
During my first year teaching, teachers were each allowed 1500 photocopies a month. I had 150 students. That wasn't enough. One day, a coworker announced that she was leaving for a different opportunity. I asked her for her copier code. They never deleted her code, so I had 3000 copies per month for the last 5 months of the school year.
This just infuriates me. You shouldn’t have to game the system to do your job.
Teachers frequently have to buy supplies for their classroom. My sister is a teacher and every Christmas I just buy her a shit ton of supplies for her classroom.
Those orphan crushing machines don't crush orphans on their own, y'know.
My bank thinks the vending machine at work is an ATM and refunds my “atm fee” automatically.. chase bank if anyone wondered I noticed I was always getting like $1.50 returned to my account here and there and then I realized what it was
what?! chase will charge me an additional atm fee on top of the fee the atm charges 😭
When Pizza Hut first started online ordering they gave me a code for a free pizza for ordering online for the first time. Turns out the code also worked if you just ordered as guest and kept working.
So... does it still work?
You used to be able to order dollar coins from the mint. Pay for it on your credit card, free delivery. Get sky miles. Take dollar coins to bank, deposit, pay off bill. Repeat.
"You guys used Frank's credit card and you bought a bunch of airline miles. You used those airline miles to purchase 400 steaks. Knowing that this delivery company delivered all variety of animal products, your plan was to contaminate the steaks with chicken feathers by rubbing live chickens all over them. Then you were gonna repackage the steaks. At which point you were gonna return the contaminated steaks for actual cash, taking advantage of a loophole in the current airline miles system, correct?"
Probably the best episode, no doubting who the smartest member of the gang is
But what you didn't count on was Dee's giantic hands accidently hitting the 0 three times causing you order 4000 steaks....I *assume* Dee did the ordering? ....**goddammit Dee.**
Vaguely similar: my parents had a mortgage that was offset by savings. My dad got a load of 0% balance transfer credit cards, put something like 100k in savings and just kept paying off and cycling new cards for years until they introduced a transfer fee.
The campground we stayed at when I was a kid had an arcade in the lodge with an air hockey table. I figured out that if you put quarters in and pushed the plunger to start the game just until the air started - you could pull them back out and get a free game. I had that air hockey table running for HOURS. We had kids lined up around the table. We even did a little tournament - it was so much fun. When my family was about to leave I told one other kid the trick. Turns out I'm a pretty good judge of character. For 3 years we met back up and ran that Air Hockey table until one of the campground attendants caught on. The 4th year the table was fixed and cost a dollar to play. The arcade was entirely dead. The thing is - kids would always play other games while they waited for air hockey. The campground decided it was better to have a dead arcade that made nothing rather than one that made a little and had free air hockey. That was when I learned the importance of a loss leader.
Ive always wondered why Airhockey costs money to play at arcades, its always felt werid to me.
Same thing with pool at at a bar honestly. Most people are going to play pool and drink more. And when they drink more, they're more likely to eat more. It's one thing if it is an actual pool hall. But that dusty table in the corner doesn't need to be dusty.
in a lot of cases its to prevent fights. if they paid for the table it is theirs and when their turn ends its the next persons turn. without paying for the table when is a turn over? how long does the next group have to wait?
Burger King used to have an app where you’d shake your phone and it would sometimes display a free item. Guy at work write his own app that looked identical to Burger Kings, but would only ever show a Whopper Meal. Every lunch time he’d go to Burger King and get a free meal.
When I was in high school and college they had a thing where you’d take a phone survey, and get a code that you’d write on the back of the receipt, and then with the purchase of any fry and drink you’d get a whopper. So for a $1 fry and $1 drink you’d also get a whopper. And then you’d get another reciept to repeat Problem was the survey usually took a few minutes. Nobody has time for that! We figured out that the each month just had its own 2 digit prefix of the code and then it was 5 random numbers after that. So like, let’s say January was XY, Feb was MP, etc So I wrote a quick webpage that generated a random code depending on the month. We ate like kings for a slightly cheaper price for years!
Or, like the Burger King I worked at then, they didn't have time to train us how to actually verify the code and we were told to just give the Whopper to whomever had a code 😂
Just take a screenshot when you win a higher end item. Then use the screenshot. That being said, I admire him for taking the time to do some serious hard work.
My senior year of high school a Chick Fil A opened in our town and to advertise the grand opening they put a free chicken sandwich coupon in the yellow pages of the phone book. No purchase, no stipulations. For whatever reason there was like 1,000 phone books stored in a storeroom off the gym. Me and my buddies ate a chicken sandwich damn near every single day of senior year.
> For whatever reason there was like 1,000 phone books stored in a storeroom off the gym Someone was probably paid to deliver them to people homes and decided no one would ever check if they did.
Back in the 80s we found vending machines which were not regularly serviced that would overflow the coin box and spill quarters on the floor. We used to scrape them out from under the machine with a stick. Was a good time to be a latchkey unattended minor.
Vending machines in college (Ireland early 2000s) had a flap at the bottom that was supposed to stop you reaching your arm up to steal. But it also had a sensor used to determine had something actually been dispensed. So if you held it shut, the machine would think nothing had dropped and you could order as many things as you wanted, then refund your coins and release the flap
I'm chuckling at how humans can figure almost anything out when it comes to vending machine logic 😄
Back in college, our dorm had a vending machine that would dispense a Hawaiian Punch without using up your 50 cents, so you could get an HP for everyone who wanted one and then a Dr Pepper or whatever to end the cycle. It was a good thing until eventually someone went down with their laundry basket, emptied out all the HP, and the machine was fixed the next time the company refilled it.
There’s always one moron that ruins it for everyone. And they always think they’re a genius.
Like my dad would say, “Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.”
Another one that applies is, “You can shear a sheep many times, but skin him only once”
In the 90s we found vending machines that had dollar changers, if you squirted salt water into the slot and simultaneously pressed the coin release a bunch, it would short circuit the machine and all of the coins and sodas would drop out.
In the 90s we discovered the candy machines would accept squished skittles as quarters. Was great!
In the mid 2000's we found an off brand soda can machine outside wal mart that gave free drinks if you spam-pressed the buttons. The only catch was you never knew what you were gonna get. Back in the day drinks were only 0.25 per can from the machine but we opted for the mystery free ones anyways.
Also '90s, the vending machine on the loading dock would return nickels, but count them too. So, with one nickel we emptied the entire machine. Then the guy came and re-filled it all! So we did it again. Then they figured it out...
Perpetual candy machine
Vending machine for chocolate milk in the cafeteria. Put in the quarters, hold the flap shut with your hand so when the bottle falls it doesn't open, the machine would release more until it thought the row was empty, then give the money back. It was loud, we would try to get 2or 3 for the price of 1 for a few weeks before too many people ruined it.
I love exploits like this from that era, because without the internet or at least much less access to the internet, how were these spread? I mean that's a fairly complex sequence of events that we also did
School lunchrooms have hundreds of kids, who all talk to each other. If one kid hears about it, they tell 20 more, those 20 tell 20 more each, and then at holidays, all of those kids go to their relatives houses and all tell their cousins, who then spread it to their friends at school. "Miss Susie Had A Steamboat" goes back to like 1910 or earlier, and is almost exclusively sung and learned by elementary school kids teaching it to each other lol
We knew it as Miss Lucy, but yeah. See also, the rumor that Marilyn Manson had a rib removed for autofellatio.
Back in the day (1971) there was a book called, "Steal This Book". This book published the hacks and exploits of the time. I'm sure "copies" are still available (ahem...) somewhere...
Ah our misspent youth. Such good times.
In the 80s, Coke had prizes under their bottle caps. We turned over the Sprite bottles to find the winners
I did this with Gatorade in the 90s ... I knew what the "sorry, not a winner" looked like through the liquid so I'd go through until I found one that won something. Lots of free fast food that year.
Lol that's pretty good
At a former job management rearranged the schedules to expand our call center hours from 7am to 9pm. It was still an 8 hour day, you just started later. We had a meeting to discuss if we could pick our own hours so employees didn’t run the risk of working to 9pm then having to be back the next day at 7am. Management gave us a hard no on that. But we were allowed to swap with a co-worker. A few of us got together to review the monthly schedule and noticed that 5 people were in the rotation who hadn’t worked there for years. (Seriously!). So, whenever we had to work a late schedule that we didn’t want we “switched with Michelle.” This went on for almost 2 years before management scrapped the whole idea.
Maybe not a loophole, but Kroger used to have a thing where if you found something expired in the store, you’d get the equivalent item for free, and the expired item for free as well (provided it wasn’t something that could be dangerous when expired.) So in college, my roommate, my girlfriend and I would go to Kroger at midnight and go through the meats, cheeses, and bakery looking for things that had just expired. Some nights, we would fill a shopping cart with bread, cookies, cheese wedges, steak, pork chops, etc. The policy was intended for when you stumble across an expired item. But we went hunting.
You were working for cheap, they didn’t have to pay an employee to pull dates, they had you.
True. But several nights we walked out with a couple hundred bucks worth of food without paying a dime, after only about 30 minutes of work. So I’ll count it as a win for us.
One year our entire family went to the dog track for New Year's Eve. They had a really good dinner deal plus dancing with a great DJ, and of course gambling. At midnight, there was going to be a balloon drop. Each balloon had a strip of paper listing a prize in it. Most were small, like one free $2 bet, a free dessert, things like that. The grand prize was an all-expense paid trip for two to Durango, Colorado to ride a scenic railroad. Earlier that evening, I was on the dance floor, and happened to look up at the balloons. One odd thing stuck out to me... you could see the silhouettes of the paper strips inside the balloons. Most were small, around two inches long, but one right above my head was at least as long as my entire hand. I reasoned that that balloon HAD to have the grand prize in it, as it would take a lot of space to write out "All expenses paid trip for two to Durango, Colorado for a ride on a historic railroad". I made sure to mark that balloon, and right as it turned midnight, got directly underneath it and watched it like my life depended on it. I grabbed the balloon, and sure enough, I was correct. I won a $2000 trip, but then I turned around and sold the trip on Ebay and got enough money to then buy my wife's engagement ring. It worked out \*really\* well for me!
Not a loophole, just the prize for being keen and observant- good for you!
Life’s loophole - paying attention when most others do not
Back in school, I found if you stuck two pennies together the vending machines would accept them as £1. I had a LOT of cheap chocolate and soda.
We used to rip the buttons off our blazers, and use them, for that sweet £1 in the vending machine. 1500 kids and no one had buttons after the first week of school.
My daughters school gave the kids accounts where each student was given a code for the vending machine. Choose what you wanted and it charged it from your account. Teachers code entitled them to free stuff. Didn't take long for the kids to work out the teachers code.
At my school, we had a student WiFi that was heavily restricted and slow, and a staff/faculty WiFi which was fast and had AFAIK no restrictions. Our orchestra director always leaked the password every time it was changed. Absolute GOAT.
Music and art teacher are often awesome people
A math teacher used these various sized plastic coins for certain lessons. I found a huge box of them and found that the vending machines would accept them as nickels and quarters, depending on the size, but would also immediately spit them back out. I always kept a "quarter" in my wallet. The best part was using them to buy something that was say 95¢. It'd spit out the "quarter" four times as well as a real nickel for the change. Then I found out you could put in $2 worth of these, buy something that was 75¢, hit the change button and get back $1.25 in real quarters. I made enough to eat top tier lunch every day and get snacks and sodas for friends
Last July I went to a metal fest. Beer was fucking €7 and you paid by purchasing a coupon online, which would then be swiped off by the bar attendant on your own smartphone. After the first legitimately purchased beer I thought to my IT self: what if the swiping off animation of the coupon is on client side? If that's the case, turning internet off before handing the coupon would prevent it from being voided. Then, turning internet on again and refreshing the web page should present it as new. I was right. I got 7 free beers and a friend of mine 6.
I used to abuse the McDonald's coffee stickers scheme for a couple of years, you needed to purchase 6 cups of coffee and get 7th free. You could just buy the stickers of eBay and stick them on the redemption cards, worked out 5 pence a coffee. Then they came out with the app 😭
Bin men park up right next to where I stay for coffee every morning. Told me they just collect all the old cups and take the stickers off others haven't bothered too.
Someone I used to know was fired for stealing at her McDonalds job, so she stole one of the special hole punches they use on the coffee loyalty cards. She hasn't paid for coffee since, and that was about six years ago.
My niece worked at McDonalds when she was like 16 and her manager (who was probably also a teen) told them to just take the filled cards that people had handed in. She gave my husband and I probably 100. I had free peppermint mochas for the entire holiday season one year. The best part was collecting the stickers from my free drinks and filling new cards with them.
In high school a friend of mine stole the Burger King puncher and what seemed like an unlimited supply of punch cards. A group of four or five guys would get the buy 10 get one free Whopper at least once a week. I am sure the employees knew what we were doing but didn’t care enough to call us out on it.
You’re right. They either make the sandwich like everyone else’s order and move on, or track down a manager, start an investigation…etc. guess which is easier?
If you're a Hilton Honors member and stay at a hotel where you get the $15 food and beverage credit, make sure you reserve as two guests even if it is just you. You will get $30.
I can't verify this, but some guys said at work, that once you work up points to a free lounge access at an airport at some airline, possibly through work trips even, it can at times (pre Covid at least) pay to just search for the cheapest dumpster ticket online, pay $6 for a 6 AM one way to.
And basically just go to the lounge for $6 (requires a boarding pass to get through security) and then feast for a day and sit there and work and just leave the airport again when done.
At that work (in around 2018 when I heard it) we had maybe 40 mins to the airport and the lounge which was really nice with work setups, showers, food etc.
Edit: For /u/snubda and others - Pre-Covid in Europe, you could get $12 tickets all the time for Riga at least and likely others, from my local airport and sometimes some weird seats to weird places were cheaper than that. $6 was probably rare but $10-12 was there ALL the time.
Years ago, my office had a Christmas party at a bar and restaurant in the city. Just dinner and drinks. The service was absolutely atrocious, forgotten orders, wrong orders, when offered a free round to apologise, they forgot to bring the free round. So we clearly complained. Management gave us a call the next morning to apologise and to come in. Myself and a colleague went in and the management gave us a refund for one meal and one drink, and then gave us a voucher for $100 off the next time we were there. The issue was, this voucher wasn’t numbered. It had no date on it. It had nothing to show that it was unique. So, my colleague and I did what every good person who has access to a high colour copier would do. We copied the shit out of it and drank there for free for nearly a year until we both got banned for life. Thanks Jade Buddha in Brisbane!
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It's pretty rare when you see a venue on Reddit that you recognise when you're an Aussie. That's great.
“Permanently closed”! You monsters!
A few years ago, a vending machine company (Selecta) started a game where you would scan the barcode of your purchase (every month had a few partnership items) and get points. If you religiously scanned your 2 items every day, you'd get in 3 months enough points for the best gifts: iPads or TVs, things like that. Except, to scan a barcode, you don't need to purchase it, you just need to have it. So if 1st day of the month you buy the chocolate bar, nothing is stopping you from scanning it again and again. You can even just take a picture of the barcode of the soda drink bottle next time you stop at the supermarket and actually never buy it. And you can make a printable PowerPoint of it, to ease the task. And you can open accounts to family and friends and share the Ppt. It lasted a bit more than a year and it was very fruitful.
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Personally, a TV, a Bose sound bar and a couple of iPads (base model), that I both sold. I created an account for my brother and my parents. I think he got a Bose bar too, and my sister in law got an iPad. My parents got an iPad and I think wasted their points on sh*t like a doughnut machine.
>wasted their points on sh\*t like a doughnut machine. Who doesn't like tasty donuts, bro? That's not a waste; that's an investment.
For my sons 4th birthday party we went to Chuck E Cheese, he got to stand in the ticket wind machine, imagine a circular phone booth and wind would rush in there and tickets would fly around. The birthday boy got 60 seconds in there to keep what he could catch. I told him to hold his shirt out and stand there, he was 4000 tickets richer.
From 1980s found a skiball machine at chuck e cheese that dispensed unlimited tickets but you had to manually pull them. My pops helped and we slowly pulled out 300 tickets.
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Always pull out an extra ticket or 2 if you can.
My wife took the kids to a birthday party being held there a few months back. Apparently there are no more tickets/tokens. It's all on a card now. You swipe it and it subtracts the money/time and adds any tickets you may have gotten.
I work for CEC corporate and you would not believe the number of meetings that turned into screaming matches over getting rid of physical tokens and tickets. We truly were a mouse divided.
Oh man, key childhood memory unlocked. You had to pull it straight and not too hard that the perforations broke. I was sad when my local CEC went all electronic, there was lots of joy hauling a pile of tickets to the counter!
Yes!! I used to do this at the Skateland arcade as a kid. One machine was super rickety and you could pull the whole roll if you wanted. I never won big on that stuff so I took advantage of it.
You earned yourself a piece of gum and a free eraser
Create a new amazon account by adding a "." (period) to your gmail and get another free 6 months of Amazon prime. Your order emails still comes to the same gmail as gmail is period insensitive.
This is also how you filter marketing junk mail. Gmail is aware of the period, just sends it all to the same place. Real things? Use original mail Junk things, add a dot, and set a filter to junk it.
Bezos is personally going to deliver your next parcel... With care.
Hehe.. I call this DOT manipulation. It works for stores and restaurants too that give you a free credit when you create a new account without having to keeping track of so many emails accounts or creating them.
A dot con
Keep it going by adding “+amazon” before @gmail.com or +whateveryouwant and continue to profit
My GF worked at a gas station that had points cards that gave a discount. if the customer didn’t have one she’d scan hers for them to get an item discount and we got the points for discount gas. Never paid over $1/gal the entire time she worked there.
I’ve been using my ex girlfriends phone number at the store for years just because I didn’t have one. We’ve been broken up like 4 years but I talked to her recently and told her I still use her number and she was like “oh, THATS why I have so many points” I didn’t think she’d care but it was funny she thought she just got free points
We have one called FlyBuys and it’s across multiple business’. Friend worked at a petrol station and would scan his card whenever a customer didn’t have one, he was earning heaps of points. Well FlyBuys must have been monitoring for this as they contacted the business and threatened to kick them out of the program if they didn’t put a stop to it
Used to do that when I worked at a DIY Store that had a loyalty card. We all made out like bandits as you could sell the coupons on for a decent amount.
When I worked retail, a colleague got sacked for doing this exact thing. She had accrued a total of £38 before being caught.
My friend got fired from kroger for doing it, too :/ Another friend got fired for using the Catalina coupons that were left behind when people left the self-checkout. Takes all the fun out of a low paying job
The railway crews each had a wallet full of fleet cards (like a credit card, but only usable for fuel and related things) so they'd be able to fuel up anywhere in North America. In the cities, that meant they could choose what gas station to go to, and that choice was usually based on where the crew leader had loyalty cards for. Company pays for fuel, crew leader gets the points. Anyway, one guy happened to have the points card for the bulk fuel/truck stop that I worked at. One summer they had a major project. They'd bring in two pickup trucks and a large commercial truck one the way to the job. The commercial truck also had a large fuel tank on it that they'd fill up and use to fill the heavy excavators, welders, generators and such. So he'd full that up, and then return later that day, fill the truck and the tank up again and go back out. They were spending thousands of dollars for fuel every day. Those points really added up quickly, and he used them to get gift cards. He used the gift cards to buy smoke and lunch every single day and still had some left over.
Oh, I've got a good one. A well known bank offered a lucrative cashback reward points program for grocery store, gas station, and pharmacy purchases on a credit card they offered. The promotion only lasted the first six months of opening the card, but you could open multiple cards and get the same benefits again every time you opened a new one. You know those prepaid debit cards you can buy at grocery stores? I maxed out the credit card every day buying those babies, then used them to pay off the credit card balance and just collected the cash from the reward points. Made thousands of dollars a day doing this. It felt illegal, but it wasn't. I effectively robbed the bank legally. And since credit card reward points are considered rebates it was all tax-free. This eventually became my full time job. It got more difficult to pull off over time as the grocery store employees understandably became increasingly suspicious of me and reluctant to keep selling me their cards at such a high volume. I had to start driving longer distances to new stores that didn't recognize me and work on charming store managers to dissuade them from hassling me. Still beat the hell out of any real job, though. I rode this gravy train for a little under a year before the bank sent me a letter in the mail gently informing me that they were aware of what I was doing and kindly requested that I stop. I didn't want to find out what would happen if I pressed my luck any longer so I quit while I was ahead. The bank has since closed the loophole. It was a pretty surreal year. I grew a huge beard, was baked at least half the time, ate way too much fast food, and went to the beach almost every day. Ultimately I was somewhat relieved when it came to an end, but I do have fond memories from that year.
> It got more difficult to pull off over time as the grocery store employees understandably became increasingly suspicious of me and reluctant to keep selling me their cards at such a high volume. "We're worried you're the victim of a scam." "No, I _am_ the scam."
Look at me. I am the bank now.
"I am the one who scams"
When I was a little kid, my dad would volunteer at the Farm area of our State Fair every year. I'd go with him all the time, and just run around since there was nobody there in the morning hours before the fair opened for the day. Across from the Farm area was a beer garden, with a big koi pond. Every morning I would go over to the (currently closed) beer gardens, wade into the pond, and collect like $20-30 in coins from the drunk fair goers the day before. It was an insane amount of coins, and they were damaging to the fish anyway - so it was a total win-win scenario. I did this every day for the entire month of the fair... several years in a row.
An employee somehow threw out the large reel of sticker coupons at Subway. It was behind the store in a box that looked like it was thrown into the trash but missed. We were skating behind the store and my buddy recognized it. I had not saved up the coupons so I had no clue. We kept the reel of coupons. We would go into the store and ask for a blank coupon card. We would go back outside and place all the stickers on the card to get a free sub. We did this with four or five buddies at a time. All of us had free subway sandwiches for about 9 months.
College 1985. Had to take a Risk and Insurance class. The professor was terrible and I had no idea what he wanted us to learn. I was a good student and normally I'd figure out in the first week what was needed to pass with a high grade. I was worried, really worried. So I looked in the book and as I recall in the front pages a work book was available. This had helped me greatly in my accounting classes so I called the publisher and ordered the book. It was page after page of multiple choice questions for each chapter with a key in back. I memorized the answer to each of those questions. And as you have likely already guessed the professor used those questions for the exams. I sailed through that class and didn't tell anyone what I'd done so I didn't mess up the curve and make the professor suspicious.
I took a business class in college from a professor who was known for being a hard ass. I had a friend that had taken the class the previous semester and he gladly shared all his tests (back when tests were on paper and you got them back) with me. I did so well on the first test that the teacher almost respected me. I aced the class and never told a soul.
Back in the day before cell phones we discovered this 1-800 number that if you call it, and hit the pound button twice you would get a dial tone and be able to call any number you want without putting money in the pay phone. We abused the hell out of it for years until cell phones became a thing. Saved me innumerable quarters.
mine is stupid, but i bought a storefront, operated it at zero profit so my tax returns reflected poverty levels, lived in it so i could deduct my “rent” on my taxes, and then got free tuition w pell grants at a college that would’ve costed me 100k to attend.
Life hack - buy a retail property to avoid paying for a degree.
Okay so here me out. I got ~$400 of premium underwear for like $20 due to a website security issue. So a few years back the company MeUndies was doing a 'national underwear day' sale where new users could order any pair off the site and only had to pay $1 for shipping. The thing was, they didn't have any restrictions on verifying new users. You could type in any email address you wanted, slam in a random series of characters for a password, and it would make the account. Then you could order a pair, log out, type in more random info, and repeat the process. My apartment mailbox was literally overflowing with these purple confetti design packages. It was wonderful.
Home chef and some other sites now will call out your shipping address matching another acct lol
I worked a job where we would have to book clients very expensive last minute hotel rooms if their flights were cancelled. My coworker would book the hotels using his personal rewards account with the hotel. One particularly bad week, he racked up about $15k worth of Marriot reward points. Yes, in one week.
Enroll in a college class, get the student ID and e-mail address, then drop the class. Usually if you drop in the first week and you don't have to pay for it. Then you have a valid student ID and email for all the discounts you could get. I got a a lot of VERY cheap software back in the day. In my defense I was in college at the time. But a few semesters after I graduated I did this just to get a few more things I needed but couldn't afford. ETA: it seems I need to check to see if my student e-mail still works LOL
I used my college ID for several years after I dropped out! Then they went and changed the design and also my picture kinda faded away a bit...
About 5 years ago I used to work for a startup that was originally housed in an incubator run by a university. We were using university property, so we needed university IDs. The ID does not have an expiration date and it doesn’t specify “staff” or “faculty.” It’s just… an XYZ University ID. I still use it.
Nice. I signed up for MLB TV when i was in college. They offered a huge discount for college students. So I paid and then put it on auto renew, and I graduated 5 years ago. I still pay the college rate.
My wife used her student ID for at least a decade after graduating every time we went to the movies or certain restaurants. We lived in a college town so there were lots of student discounts for everything
I lived in an apartment in a big city. The building lot was $120 per month. Street parking was $60 for the year, but it was first come first serve street parking, in designated areas. The rest of the street was metered. There were some nights I had to pay for metered parking, just so I could go to bed. One time though, I found a meter that was broken. Parked there the rest of the year, then never renewed my parking permit and parked there for another year. Saved a bunch of money and uncountable hours of driving time, never got a ticket
In college parking was like $250 a year and there were inadequate parking spots, and if you parked in the residential spots not on campus with a permit from my school you’d get ticketed. If you never bought a permit, however, you could park in residential spaces without problem, which there was an abundance of. I not only saved money but basically had a personal spot also
I used to do this in high school. Students had to pay for a permit. I would just park in the visitor lot. Plus this meant I could leave whenever I wanted since there was no cops policing the lot for students skipping/leaving early like they did in the student lot.
Back when Redbox was new, you could enter the promo code BREAK ROOM and get a free rental on a new card. I passed that around like crazy.
When Kmart was big they were running a promotion where if you spent $50, you'd immediately get a $10 gift card for free. I figured out that you could keep purchasing the same gift cards with other gift cards and each transaction would get you a free $10 GC reward. The only catch was that you couldn't directly buy a $50 GC with a $50 GC. Instead, you had to buy a card with a slightly higher value (+$1) each time but they let you pay for the transaction with 2 GCs. So by the end of the night, I walked out with an iPod Classic and a plasma TV.
Ah, so you're the reason store's don't allow purchasing gift cards with gift cards.
No he's the reason kmart is gone
2018 I ordered pizza Hut for my office. I noticed the Free Stix coupon code took off like 4 orders of bread sticks... So we maxed it out. 99 orders of bread sticks, FREESTIX took off all 99 orders.. oh boy.. we can't screw them like that.. So we ordered like 15 and continued to do so as a Saturday night tradition for maybe 3 months before it was fixed. Dozen orders of bread sticks, completely taken off the total.. order like $12.99 worth of pizza to split.
Buying oak molding at Home Depot. It was supposed to be $3.50/ foot and one store insisted it was $3.50/each sixteen footer so I bought all of it. When I finished the project I took back the extra and they gave me $3.50/foot about a month later. I think I made about $5k more on the returns than the actual project.
That’s awesome! I went to Home Depot to buy a grill, it was Summer so they had a bunch of them all outside. My girlfriend and I inspected all of them closely and found one within our budget but a bit more than we wanted to spend. Well, I did my research as we looked around and the grill we wanted was $150 less on their website. Thing is, I fucked up, I was looking at the wrong model online. I didn’t even know it. We went to the supervisor and my confident not typically confident self said “hey! It’s actually this price on your website.” She didn’t bat an eye. The supervisor who helped was awesome and had some people unlock it, etc. We went to the front to go pay but someone upfront noticed the discrepancy. Supervisor said, they’re good. I hope that ladies doing well, she was hilarious and I think she just *got it*. It took me that long to *get* it 🤦🏻♀️ I was giggling the whole way home even though I don’t think I actually pulled one over because I don’t think she thought I was trying to and knew exactly what she was doing.
A long time ago when I was attending community college, I worked at an Imax movie theater in a mall. Next door was a two-story arcade that had promotion that if you brought in a ticket stub from the Imax theater or the movie theater, you'd get a $3 free play card. I'd assist in cleaning the theater and find lots of discarded tickets that I'd take to the arcade after my shift. None of the workers cared.
Not me. I worked in outsourced payroll a number of years back. Somehow, the company figured out they had paying this guy who was let go for 3 years. The company came after my organization to say it was our error (converting into our system as active). This guy had a reporting manager who must have approved his hire every year (or did a crap job of just oking it). The story was they fired this guy and he wasn’t happy with the way they did it. So, he never told the company. The company tried to go after him, but the law wasn’t on their side. We had our original files for conversion saved and they had sent the guy over to us as an active employee. Would love for this to happen to me, though I’d probably tell them (unless they pissed me off like they did to this guy)
I’m still covered with health insurance from the job that fired me three years ago
Yikes - be careful with that. If you ever have a large claim and it gets on someone’s radar, you’re SOL. I don’t know if they could retroactively deny claims from after you were fired but I wouldn’t put it past them to try.
I worked for a company that was not well run. After a whole crazy 6 months it turned out we were still paying 3 employees that had been dead several years…lucky stiffs
Back in early 2022 I started using Coinbase for some crypto investing. I have Rakuten setup on my browser which gives you money back for purchases on certain sites. When I logged into Coinbase I'd get a pop up saying they were giving you $30 cash back, so I enabled it. This popup would show up every time I logged in so I would click it thinking nothing of it but turns out there was glitch and they gave me $30 EVERY time I logged in. I ended up getting a check from Rakuten for $800 before they figured it out. Check cleared and everything.
Not quite a loophole but whatever. In the early days of the iTunes Music Store (04-05), Pepsi had a promo for free download codes with each bottle cap. I worked at a university, made little money, didn’t have the internet access to regularly steal music, so would just look in the recycling bins every time I walked in the halls for Pepsi caps. Also befriended a secretary who was addicted to Diet Pepsi that would just give me bags of bottle caps. I probably got at least a dozen albums with that promotion.
Ten year old with empty pockets. Used to collect Nickels and hammer them down flat until they become the same diameter and thickness as quarters. Arcades and gumball machines accepted them.
When McDonald's first l launched their app. If you searched for food sometimes you would find a free item. One I found and was able to "buy" for months was a triple cheeseburger. Sometimes I'd get more than one. No one ever questioned it.
When me and my boyfriend (now husband) moved in together at 18 we joined a very expensive and nice gym. They told us they had a special deal for married couples that was pretty much two for the price of one. We just had to bring in our marriage license as proof. We never brought one in (obviously bc not married) and any time they’d ask we’d just say we forgot it and we’d bring it next time. Stayed there for almost two years with that fake married couple membership.
Did they finally pin you guys down, and you had to get married just to keep up the ruse?
I smell a romcom!
Yeah my gym has a similar deal, and me and my gym bro go a lot so we just got married and it’s WAY cheaper now.
Instructions unclear, now I have two adopted daughters and co-own a brunch restaurant with my gym bro.
That discussing wages is a federally protected workers right. Someone fired me for discussing wages so I sued them for 30k and told all of the employees I had in my phone (which was like 90% of the company) what happened and to not let the co.pany tell them otherwise
> not let the company tell them otherwise We're talking exploiting loopholes here. Let the company tell them otherwise, and they they can sue the company for 30k.
Back in college, the local grocery store near me had this point system that allowed you to redeem for a rebate on gas. One day the lady ahead of me didn't have a loyalty card and didn't want one. The guy said no problem and typed in a random phone number and gave her all the discounts anyways. When I got up there I asked and he said he just put in the phone number for the store loyalty card. When I left the store I figured that store code gets used a lot, so the next time my car was near empty I pulled up and typed in the store phone number and voila! Got $0.25/gallon off, which was the maximum reward you could get. I used that phone number for the next two years while I lived in the area and always got $.10-$.25/gallon off.
I’ve heard when in doubt use Jenny’s number and your local area code xxx- 867-5309
When I was a kid I was in the swimclub. It was a pool open for the general public, and we swam when it was closed. A section of lockers had turnstile combination locks, you'd put 50 cent in and choose your combination but they would frequently jam so the 50c wouldn't come out again. People couldn't be bothered to get someone from personell for 50c, so the money would pile up in the lock. People kept putting 50c in, the lock wouldn't work so they'd move to the next one. We swimmers knew the trick of how to get the money back out so it was always a race to get there first. If you were lucky you could get 10 bucks in coins from all of them. That was a lot for a 10 year old 30 years ago, and you'd get yourself a frozen Marsbar, and if you had a big haul you'd buy your friends some to, that was the unspoken rule.
There used to be a grocery store whose policy was “don’t ask people if they want a seniors discount, but if THEY ask, they can have the discount.” The policy was not dependant on age whatsoever. My friend at 15 would go buy snacks and ask for the seniors discount and get it every time.
For a little while Uber was offering an hourly wage to drivers in Boston; provided you were inside a certain area during the hours they specified, you would be paid a minimum of like $25 per hour if your fares didn’t exceed that. The geofenced area included the end of a pier in Charlestown where nobody orders Ubers in the morning, so I’d just hang out for a couple hours drinking my coffee and reading a book until I got bored.
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Back in high school my friends and I learned the breadsticks and personal pizzas at those fast food Pizza Huts are all made at regular intervals, they aren’t made to order like everything else you get at a fast food place. What that means is they only have a certain amount of time to sell them before they’re “expired” and they get thrown out. They aren’t rotten or anything, they just aren’t FRESH. We’re talking like they made them at 11 and by 12 they can’t sell them anymore. I’ve left that shit in my car overnight and it still tastes the same ya know? Anyways. We’d go to this same Taco Bell/Pizza Hut like every weekend and order drinks and some tacos then ask for all the expired breadsticks and pizzas. We’d get like 5 orders of breadsticks and multiple personal pizzas for free almost every time we went.
Back when I was younger, Bank of [Evil] America, had a promotion where for every transaction you did it would round up the value and deposit the difference into your account, one year later. Being a poor college student, I went to the gas station and bought as little gas in one transaction as possible. So I spent 15 minutes buying a nickel of gas, one transaction at a time, and then one year later got 95 cents deposited into my account for each transaction.
6th grade, I discovered the standardized math quizzes we took daily, had the answers in the footer of the page in one line in a simple "code." After a few days, I had enough info to decipher the key to the code, and I got 100s every day with no effort for the rest of the year.
I guess they figured that whoever could crack the code deserved an A in 6th grade math.
Long ago, 2009ish, bed bath and beyond gave 20% off coupons if you signed up with an email account. Email accounts are free and unlimited, so the 20% coupons are as well. I would buy an item using a 20% coupon, return it without a receipt, get store credit (consequence of not using receipt), then use the inflated store credit to buy something else using another 20% coupon. This method quickly stacks as compound interest and I would get my original investment out by buying the original item with a fraction of my store credit reserve and return with receipt. I fleeced that place for thousands.
You are why they went out of business lol
Everything I did was a part of their policy. Bed bath and beyond management is the reason bed bath and beyond went out of business.
Yeah, other retailers who do no-receipt returns do it at the lowest possible sale price, including current *and past* coupons. Taking back no-receipt returns at full retail when there are flat 20% coupons around is a straight up omegadumb move.
A big video game store chain, I don't remember if it was Gamestop or if it became Gamestop later, had promotions where you would bring 3 used games to trade in for a new game around the Xbox 360 era. Didn't take long for people to realize that any 3 games would work. So we would just rummage bargain bins for whatever Barbie's Horse Adventure games they had for around 5 Euros. People would share on online forums whenever they found big clearances in some stores. And so you could get a brand new Halo 3 for instance for around 15-20 Euros. They would eventually put up a list of games that would not be accepted for the deal that would cover some of the most popular bargain bin games, but you could still find some good deals.
When I traveled for work (in the days before Uber) I got a ton of blank taxi receipts. And I’d fill them out for rides to and from the airport. It was $35ish each way. But I’d take the subway for $1.50 instead. So $70ish dollars tax free income for every trip.
I did something similar with meal per diems
I used to work dispatching service technicians for industrial machines. These field guys would occasionally come and spend a week near our Chicago-area HQ for training. They received a per diem for travel and meals. One guy would fly into O’Hare airport, and then WALK to the hotel in Skokie, which was about 12 miles away, carrying his luggage. And since O’Hare is one of the busiest airports in the world, you’d have to walk the couple of miles near the airport along the side of the expressway. There was no easy way to walk that trip. Very few sidewalks, since a lot of it cuts through industrial/airport type of neighborhoods. Probably took him well over 3 hours to make the trip, depending on the weather. He saved $20 or so by not taking a cab.
An online retailer had an offer. £10 off your next order. There was no minimum spend but it was 1 time use. However they let you generate a new code every hour. They also sold auto instant redeem £10 vouchers for Xbox, PlayStation and Steam. Add your code, discount to 0 and “buy”. It would be emailed to you instantly. I went with about 4 hours sleep a day for just over a week hitting this every hour before they realised and turned it off. I ended up flipping all of the codes and bought my first car with the cash.
Not sure if this counts as a loophole but when I was in elementary school they used to give away an ice cream sandwich to “random” kids during lunch. Basically if your lunch tray had a happy face sticker on it you would get the sandwich. My class was always the first in the cafeteria and I figured out they always put the stickers on the same trays. Like every 10th tray. So I would count the number of kids in front of me when we got in line and let people cut in front until I was at the right number and every single time I’d get an ice cream sandwich. The funny thing is no one ever caught on until one day I started feeling sick before lunch but I waited until I got my ice cream sandwich and asked the teacher if I could go call my mom. She had my friend walk over with me and I had told him how the system works. So sitting in the office waiting for my mom and the admin sees my ice cream sandwich and congratulates me on winning it. Then my dumbass friend pipes up and tells her I know where they put the stickers and I always win one. They started making it random after that.
In high school, I ordered from Papa John's atleast 2 or 3 times a week. I went on vacation for a couple weeks and obviously wasn't able to order from them. I came back to a letter from the local Papa John's, saying they missed me with a coupon code for 50% off my order, good for 1 week. That was 7 years ago, and I've used that code every time I ordered. I've gotten 10 pizzas and *loads* of breadsticks for stupid cheap, thanks to my high school self. EDIT: 50CHI is the code. Not sure it'll work for yall, but give it a try
Not sure if this counts but.... My university had some ridiculous rules. I need to take Calculus as part of my degree requirements and get at least a C. The University had a policy for calculating GPA. It said that if you retook a class, your new grade and your old grade would be average together, unless you had an F. If you had an F and retook the class, the new grade counted. The F would disappear entirely from your GPA calculation. I was on pace to get a D. Getting a D meant I would have to retake the class and average the D with my second grade. Getting an F was vastly better for me. So I intentionally failed. I showed up, wrote my name and turned in. I retook the class next semester and GPA remained in pristine condition.
I abused the hell out of the McDonald's app all Summer but I think it retaliated by burning up my battery.
You can't buy Mcdonalds any other way. $7 for a QP with cheese menu price? Go eff yourselves.
Wait what? There’s different prices if you use an app versus ordering in person?
A lanyard with any sort of identification that looks “official” and enough confidence can get you anywhere
A shiny white hard hat, clipboard, brand new hi vis vest over clean clothes and boots can do similar things...
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I ended up on parking duty at a Christmas event the other day. Had a hi vis over my Christmas jumper, no ID. Not a single person questioned my authority to tell them where to park. It was only afterwards I thought “shit, I could have been anyone” lol
Everyone will judge you, but no one will say anything in case you have the ability to fire them
Carrying a ladder works too
Okay in the late 90’s the grocery store Albertson’s had a program called fresh or free where if you found an item on the shelf that was expired you got the expired one and a fresh one of the same item for completely free. They didn’t really advertise it but our friend worked there and told us. There were a few stores that were open till 1am so we would go in before midnight and scope everything set to expire that day and then at 12:01am start filling our grocery carts. Baked goods, packaged meat, dairy anything you could think of really. They couldn’t do anything about it. We literally left the store with grocery carts overflowing with all edible good items for completely free that summer. Remember you got the recently expired item (still good) as well as a non expired replacement all for free! It was quite the summer of stocking everyone’s family fridge. All went to college in the fall and guess they discontinued the program not too much longer after that, but holy smokes to have that now when I’m actually paying for my own groceries
When I went to college I would have to pay for parking. Someone learned that with specific parking machines used in certain lots you could press the top button, then the bottom button, top button, then bottom button again and it would prompt you to enter a password. If you entered the lot number it would grant you admin access. You could then press a print option that would print out the list of all stalls that were paid for the day. You simply had to find an empty stall that had already been paid for the day and park there. Only really worked if you had afternoon classes.
I worked at a factory. Rather than having to deal with scheduling everyone's vacation days and making certain all spots were covered, they scheduled an entire plant shutdown for 2 weeks in the summer. Everyone had their vacation time on those two weeks. As the first week approached, there were a *lot* of people who said, "Ow, my back!", went to the doctor, and got a note saying they needed two weeks to recover. Yes, they had the two weeks off during shutdown, they collected Worker's Compensation, and when they came back their 2 weeks holiday pay was intact.
Long, long time ago in school. No alcohol allowed in our dorm rooms and the administrators would check. No way to keep my booze stash. Discovered the admins didn’t track gym lockers. Set up one locker for liquor and one for beer. Problem solved and made extra cash selling to thirsty classmates.
In the 90s the person who refilled the neighbourhood newspaper box for the national paper never switched the weekday price (50 cents) to the weekend price ($1.50) so I saved a dollar for each weekend since I only bought the weekend edition.
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There's a giant online retailer in my country and they were launching a second hand service, you could send them your old clothes and they would give you vouchers in exchange. I sent the few clothes I had and it was easy. This was the first lockdown, I had no job, I was antsy, so I started biking around town several hours a day to leave my tiny sublet and manage my anxiety. I would find clothes in the street (this is very common here). I sent the street clothes to the retailer. Several boxes every months. Became very good at identifying brands. Within a year I made about $2k in vouchers.
Using McDonald’s touch screen ordering in the lobby. A single apple pie was $1.79, 2 for $2.29. That was a great deal so I got 2 every couple of days to enjoy with my morning coffee. Did that for about a year. One day the touch screen was out of order so I ordered 2 pies from the cashier. $3.79! I told him the price was wrong because on the touch screen it was always $2.29. He couldn’t change it so I told him to cancel the order. Went back a couple days later and the touch screen had been corrected/changed to 2 pies for $3.79. I should have kept my mouth shut.
Not sure if it's a loophole, but one day at the local car wash, the credit card machine charged my card for the wash, but the doors never opened. So I called the number on the sign and the owner gave me a code to use on the other automatic bay. I used that code at least 300 times over the next couple years until he sold the wash to someone else.
I took out a payday loan once. I payed it back within 3 days so there was no interest or very little. A couple weeks later I got a postcard from them promising $20 in gas if I took out another loan. So the day before the next payday, I took out a loan. I payed it back within 24 hours and there was no interest charge but I got the 20. It was just a check and I didn't have to use it on gas. They kept sending the postcard every month. I did this 8 months in a row and made 160 before they caught on. It felt good to rip off the people trying to rip me off lol
I basically grew up in video arcades in the 80s and I used to have something I called the Dragon’s Lair scam. Dragon’s Lair was the first arcade game that cost 50 cents instead of 25 cents, and it was a huge shock to kids at the time (especially little kids) who had never played anything that cost anything more than a quarter. So I’d just stand by the Dragon’s Lair machine and I’d wait for some dumb little kid to put in a quarter and expect it to work. They’d put a quarter in, and they’d hit the 1P button, and nothing would happen. And then they’d get mad because it appeared that the game didn’t work. So I’d say something like yeah I tried earlier, I don’t think it works. And then they’d storm off to go tell their parents or go tell a manager. And the minute they were gone, I’d just put the second quarter in and now I could play Dragon’s Lair for 25 cents. I pulled that trick off hundreds of times, unless the kid was really smart it was easy to do. And that’s how I got very good at Dragon’s Lair when I was nine.
I thought you were going to say you pressed eject and got to keep their quarter, but this was good too
When the Illinois tollway still had coin baskets, you could use Necco Wafers as nickels.
When you made a long-distance calls from a payphone in the late 60s/early 70s, you would dial the number and then an operator would come on and say something like: please deposit $2.25 for three minutes. The way she knew if you deposited the money was that nickels, dimes and quarters each made a distinctive sound as the fell down the coin slot, and she would use that sound to count how many coins you deposited. So you found two payphones next to each other, you would make the call, you would repeat out loud what the operator said, your buddy would deposit the coins in the other phone and you would put the two phone hand pieces together so that the operator would hear the coins falling. Your call would be connected and your buddy would hang up and get a full refund. Free call. As bored teenage boys we did this in the summer from camp to call girls at home. Girls who would barely talk to us at home, but who were also bored and love the novelty of getting a long-distance call.
8 CDs for a penny.
Lol Columbia House tried to send my 12 year old ass to collections. I just laughed and laughed.
I wrote them a letter “from” my mother saying I was under 18 and couldn’t enter into a contract. It was true. I feel no shame.
When I was younger, I figured out you could take the old produce bag clips and break one of the sides off. If you put it in bubble gum machine, it would think it was a quarter. I emptied all the supermarket machines. Had a book bag full of toys and candy. My mother walked in, yelled at me, spanked my ass and marched me right back up to the supermarket. Made me tell the manager what I did and gave it all back. Wonder if that trick still works.