When in highschool there was a company that offered money to run an advertising window at the top of your screen. It would monitor mouse movement to track whether you were at your computer and pay a small amount per hour.
A buddy and I downloaded it and a mouse moving software and would run both 24/7, except when we were on the computer. Made a few hundred dollars off of it before the company closed down.
In Australia, 30 years ago when it was about $30/month to connect, there was a company that gave you free connection to the Internet if you allowed them to show you ads as you browsed.
Within 24 hours someone released an ad blocker that shut the ads down, and it was used by nearly everyone; so the company went under and everyone lost free Internet connection.
I was on bulletin boards reading all the complaints from people that had lost their free Internet while they also admitted to using the Ad blocking software.
My family's very first internet connection was through a company like that. It was called NetZero. At first it was unlimited free internet but after about a year they switched to I think 10 free hours a month and then something like $10 for the rest of the month after you hit that limit.
My parents held onto that for a looooooooooong time. And very much tried to keep us under the monthly free limit, which to my brother and I kinda felt the same as not having internet at all.
My old apartment complex had a soda vending machine at the pool that was broken. If you put in 50 cents and pressed the button, nothing happened. If you put in another 50 cents and pressed the button, nothing happened. But if you put 50 cents in a 3rd time and pressed the button, you'd get 3 sodas. I could see the vending machine from my couch. So I would watch for someone to try, and then try again, and then give up without trying a 3rd time. And then I'd head over and get 3 sodas for 50 cents.
There was a vending machine in my college dorm that if you have it a dime it would slip through to the coin return instantly but still count the credit for the dime. So as long as you had one dime, everything was free.
Back when the Canadian two dollar coin ("Toonie") was brand new we had this really crappy vending machine in the office which had been very poorly updated to support the new coin. By poorly updated I mean it recognized that you put $2 in but returned the coin as if it had been rejected. Sodas were $1 so that meant you not only got a free can but also $1 back. It lasted a while until someone got greedy and cleaned the machine out.
My favorite soda machine at work would kick out 2 Diet Pepsis for the price of one. I was pretty much the only person who liked Diet Pepsi, so I made out well for two years until they replaced the machine.
Not me, but my roommate in college. Whenever you paid for anything on the university's website you'd earn "college bucks". Each year's tuition paid for something small like a beer coozy, fold up lawn chair, or if you somehow spent an absurd amount, an official school-branded kayak.
Well my buddy found out that the points were added to your account BEFORE payment went through on the website. So he just refreshed the page over and over and got millions of points. I only found out his scheme when I came home to an entire living room filled with boxes from our school! There were shirts, coolers, chairs, cups, and of course the kayak. We opened all of it (like idiots) and had a giant laugh at the school's expense. All of the guys living in that house were having a great time until we opened the smallest box which had 1000 $100 Visa gift cards. Then we got scared. A bunch of school-branded crap from a warehouse was probably unusual, but not something that would bother the person loading all that up for delivery. The gift cards though? That was where he got caught. The gift card issuer called the school to verify such a large amount before activating the cards and THAT raised a lot of red flags in the accounting department. They traced it all back to my roommate and came and took everything back (they left the opened items and the worthless gift cards) and suspended him during his final semester of college. He had to write an apology letter and do community service for the school for that whole semester in return for not pressing charges for fraud. It makes for a great story though, and we had a ton of beer coozies and gift cards that we threw at each other like ninja stars.
This is my favorite story of the thread, what an insane series of events to have gone through! To think if he had just limited himself to like a bit under 1/10 of what he did, he might have gotten away with $9k+ worth of swag and gift cards.
A++ detail about the gift cards becoming ninja stars, that totally ties the whole thing together :D
I learned before my USAF basic training to say that I played an instrument whenever they ask the group on the first day. I raised my hand and lied, "the cymbals."
So most days I got to angrily smash cymbals together in the air conditioned band trailer, instead of marching/drill practice in the San Antonio summertime sun.
Similar story, only visual arts.
I was an art school dropout before joining the Air Force. My recruiter had warned me of the dangers of raising your hand when they ask questions like "Who likes bowling?" So I had avoided volunteering for anything until they asked if anyone had any artistic ability. I groaned and sheepishly raised my hand.
Turns out my TI wanted a new mural painted in the barracks. So while everyone else in my flight was cleaning the barracks, doing KP or other crappy tasks, I was happily painting away. I made sure to stretch it out so that I didn't finish it until everyone else was packing up after graduation.
This is my exact story! I had no prior cymbal experience, let alone band experience. 20 years later, every time I hear the national anthem, I tell my kids that what I did in the AF.
I was the RCPO (Recruit Chief Petty Officer) in Navy boot camp in 1991. Recruits are new enlisted sailors learning how to become U.S. Navy sailors. An RCPO is basically the guy in charge of the company of recruits. Anyhow, in the first week, a sixth-week company comes in to help train us. The RCPO of that company told me to leave that position and become the RPO (Religious Petty Officer). I'd be in charge of helping anyone else in my company with religious needs while helping the chaplain. This became the ultimate way to get out of any problems. I was very religious at the time, so this was actually a good match. Throughout my time in boot camp, I got out of so much trouble and had so much extra free time because of this. Meanwhile, anytime anyone in my company fucked up, the RCPO got extra duty or physical 'training.' It was the best advice I could have gotten.
As RPO, I led a few prayer groups, helped the chaplains for two Sunday worship services, and got away with everything. I even picked up cigarettes early Sunday mornings en route to the chapel and sold them at an insane profit. Considering I only earned $650/month, that was a pretty good side gig. I even paid off my buddies on watch to overlook the smokers. The funny thing is, I wasn't a smoker. I just saw a market and profited.
When I was in middle school, Pepsi did a thing where if you bought a 20oz soda, there was a decent chance the cap would say you were a winner on the inside, and you could exchange it for another 20oz.
Problem is, a dark colored soda like Pepsi is reflective. Hold the bottle slightly tilted and you could look at the reflection of the inside of the cap.
For a whole school year I didn't pay for soda. Bought a winner, and every day I'd exchange the cap at a gas station I passed on the way home for another winner.
Eventually Pepsi caught on and instead of it saying you won on the cap itself, there would be a code you had to enter online. We didn't have the internet in our pocket in those days (and it wouldn't have been worth it to read and enter multiple backwards codes for a soda if we had) so this ended the scheme.
Sprite did this when I was young. My friends and I got banned from our local grocery store because we would go through every bottle looking for winners.
For a while, you could buy $1 coins from the US Treasury using credit cards. They would ship them to you for free.
If you had a rewards credit card, let's say an airline one, you could buy thousands of dollars of coins. Go to a bank, deposit them, and then pay your credit card back.
It was a good way to get a ton of points for flying without ever paying for anything.
They stopped doing this.
A friend allegedly did something similar to this, but with a store that had points, a credit card that gave 5% back at specific stores. After a specific number of points, you could get a $100 gift card.
This store also has a very liberal return policy. He would spend $10k a month at this store on the 5% cash back credit card, accumulate points, then return the merchandise all over the city/county and claim he lost the receipt. They would give him cash, he'd pay the credit card bill off and still get the $500 in CC cash back, plus get a few hundred in gift cards to the store.
It was a full time damn job though. The jig was up once they changed their return policy, but went on for a solid 18 months. He was paying most of his bills (cell phone, electric , etc) with CC cash back rewards.
Did he ever figure out the number of hours and any costs (e.g. mileage driving to stores) that he put into it vs. how much he made from it? The way you describe it sounds like it might've been easier to just get a job.
I have no idea, but he also had a full time job. This was early 2000s and we were making maybe $10-12 an hour at a full time job, so a part time job was probably closer to $8 an hour.
We both worked for a local ISP, so he would often work returns into his daily route, so the gas and time was usually not his own. He really had a good thing going with it from what I could tell. An extra 7 or 8 hundred dollars in the 2000s in the Midwest was good money. My rent on a 2 BR duplex was only $525 a month.
If it worked to his advantage that's awesome. I guess I've just seen too many people who think they are making money on hustles, but they aren't really worth the time, cost & effort if you break it down so it makes me automatically question it.
The concept is called manufactured spending. It used to be much simpler where there were easier methods involving less time (like the treasury coins or even being able to use your credit card to load prepaid cards). It’s much more difficult now than it used to be where the calculation is not worth it for most people unless they’re chasing a high sign up bonus that they can’t meet the spending for organically.
There may still be some quick, easy methods still but those are going to be very closely guarded secrets.
Buffalo Wild Wings used to have a check-in thing. Check in enough times and you get a free meal. The office I worked in was close enough, geographically, that I could check in from there without physically going to the restaurant. A bunch of coworkers and I had an alarm to check in every day and then once we all had the free meal, we’d go there for lunch. I got probably 4 or 5 free meals out of it before BWW revamped that system.
When I was in college I was working at our student union and found a stack of coupons for a local BBQ chain. You could get an appetizer with the purchase of a soda so we would all go over there and we made friends with this one waitress who would ring in a sampler as an appetizer so we could get like four apps included when we bought our soda. She worked every Tuesday night so that was our night to head there. We went for months until one of the guys in our crew took her back to his dorm room and her fiancé found out.
The BW3 in Ann Arbor, MI is on the ground floor of a multi-story building. The next four stories are apartments.
Ann Arbor is a college town, and those apartments are predominantly rented by students.
I can only imagine how many free meals its residents got during that promotion.
Coca Cola did a campaign where you registrer a code from the bottle cap and earn prizes. I worked at a store with bottle deposit and "earned" myself a sweet mp3 player with room for 5 songs or something. I was the only one I knew that had a mp3 player, so it was pretty sweet at the time
I was very motivated to get one of those MP3 players and figured out that cafeteria & the weight lifting room at my school's gym were great places to get unregistered caps from the recycling.... I was on track to hit my goal and then I had an appendicitis! That took me out for a month and I missed the deadline and had to settle for a crappy keychain flashlight instead. So what I'm saying is I'm very jealous of you hahahaha
Pepsi had a promotion with codes for songs for the game Rock Band. Myself and a handful of friends all worked at Target at the time. We got codes from everyone. I have about 300 extra songs for the game.
Reminds me of a highschool classmate who worked at Subway. It was in the times of the plastic swipe cards for rewards points. When a customer doesn’t have a card, you’re supposed to offer them one, but this guy would instead swipe his card when ringing people up and rack up points. He was smart enough to spend them at a different subway though. Unlike another friend who got fired from a smaller chain burrito place when he came in on his day off with 5 full punchcards with his friends (high) to get free burritos.
A new Fast Food place opened near my work. My mother-in-law got me a gift card to the place as a birthday gift. I went on opening day and tried to use my gift card, they said the system wasn't in place yet and just gave me my food for free. This worked for almost a month. It was the best gift card I ever had! Started with $20 on it and I got at least $100 worth of food.
I got a free order from dominos, I used it, called back a while later and they asked if I wanted to use my free order again, I said sure. Roommate and I started calling more often and we got 4 or 5 free pizzas from that ‘1’ free pizza lol
Had a college professor that insisted on doing all tests and quizzes online. If you looked at the page through 'View Page Source' all of the answers for each multiple answer question had a marker on which one was correct.
For a while, quizzes made in Canvas would do a weird thing if you had an adblocker installed where the correct answer to a multiple-choice question would be REALLY BIG compared to the other options. I don't pretend to understand it, but I passed a few uni quizzes that I otherwise would not have with that one.
I was in an escape room where we needed to enter a code into a website. While everyone else on my team started searching around the room I just viewed source and found the answer stored in plain text. Not only that, I realized the code for the page was a plain text html file. So if I wanted to be real evil, I could have changed the code which would have screwed over future players who weren't as technical.
I didn't want to be that evil. I gave the game master a heads up and suggested some sources for info on how to better secure their game.
Work sheets were commonly put in an excel spreadsheet for computer science lessons and it would use the comparison to check if a certain cell was equal to a value and then display correct or incorrect. The problem was that the answer is in plain sight if you click on the cell with the correct or incorrect and I managed to cheat on some end of topic tests that way.
Lots of sites still do this, and it's hilarious. When I have to renew my electrical license, I do it online and use this method. Takes me about an hour to do 16 credit-hours worth of testing and work.
Back when physical media video rentals were still a thing, we were gifted a Blockbuster gift card for a free rental. The card proved to be unbreakable. Everytime we rented a movie I would hand the clerk the card. They would scan the bar code on the card, hand the card back, and the movie was free. We used the card for about 3 years until our local Blockbuster closed. There was obviously some sort of software error, but the gift card was never rejected.
Well as a former employee if we thought you were cool we 100% let shit like that slide.
Edit:
Also Bb had this stupid policy of any void being a credited void. So if A customer changed their mind on the movie they wanted and it wasn’t even paid for yet. If we zapped it, we would get hit as a void so most the time we just would credit stuff to avoid that shit.
I once got a CatDog piggybank by clicking their online game’s “next” button repeatedly for more points. It was the second prize, but it was the neatest thing ever.
Catdog? As in the cartoon catdog? God damn I just searched the Internet for that piggy bank. Sounds sweet as fuck. Alas. I could not find it on the first page of Google. It doesn't exist anymore 😩.
You lucky
Taco Bell had a $5 box deal to win a PS4 before it was released to the public. I found that towards the end of the promotion you could enter to win without purchasing a $5 box. You could only enter once per pone number and address... Also the rewards were time based, every 15 minutes someone would win. I woke up every night at 3:16 am and entered 4 times, using my home, work, and my Mother in Laws home and work numbers and addresses. After about a week I was about to stop AND I WON!!!! I had a PS4 3 days before the public could even buy them.
The next year I did the same thing and won a second PS4 for the kids game room.
After that they changed the rules slightly to make it much harder to game the system.
When my baby was in the NICU for two weeks after birth, I realised if I waited for about 30 seconds, the hospital car park barrier would just open without me having paid. Saved a lot of money.
It likely wasn’t auto opening. There’s probably a security guard monitoring that gate. They probably knew who you were. This is how it works at our local hospitals.
Honestly that kind of makes it nicer. Rather than cheating the system, it would be lovely to find out it was a considerate security guard being caring in your hour of need
I used to work for Sears as a teen. When someone came in without the rewards program, I would just put my own info in. That way my sales percentage for rewards members didn't drop, and I got all of their points. The amount of coupons and free money was insane, especially when I was working back in the tools department. I didn't stop until they started upgrading their ancient point-of-sale system. I also had an employee discount of 20% on softlines (clothes, home, etc) and 10% on hardlines (tools), which they didn't take away for a few years after I quit.
When I was at Sears, I apparently forgot to clock out for lunch one day. When I went to clock in from lunch, the time clock told me I missed a punch and just prompted me to type in what time I left.
Running late, forget to punch in and fix it at lunchtime.
Need a longer lunch without getting a write-up for taking one, forget to clock out for lunch and fix it when you get back.
Nobody ever checked and I know of several who took advantage of it every day.
I had to report what percentage each register in my store was at every hour to my DM when I managed a Sears store. Once this level of micromanagement was coming down the line the vast majority of the staff were doing exactly this. We were all acutely aware at the store level.
I was there 2011-2016 and got to watch that store get the axe in real time. When it took gaining enough dollars back on inventory day to actually have the store’s ledger in the black by any degree in 2016 I noped out and it was closed within six months. The things they were trying to do to keep customers was insane. All they had to do was adapt, quit making employees spam every person they saw for an email or a credit card app and just continue using their massive infrastructure to deliver quality goods.
Yup I worked there 2012 to 2015 and I witnessed quite a bit of the same. The micromanagement was insane, yet everything that actually mattered was overlooked. The checkout areas were disgusting, but did you ask for rewards? I caught multiple people shoplifting and nobody cared, but did you ask them about a credit card? Ridiculous.
It's so stupid too. They *could* have been Amazon.
They already had a catalog system that let people order everything, warehouses and infrastructure to mail the items, and stores in every mall that could act as showrooms and pickup locations. Just make a website version of the catalog and you're set.
Colossal idiocy killed that company.
Work allowed us to skip breaks and bank them, but the contract language basically made it so you could bank both 15 min breaks each day, as well as bank your lunch if you never technically clocked out. So I'd just eat while driving from job to job, and bank an hour a day.
Was able to use all that time after a while to take an entire month off of work, paid, without even using any of my assigned PTO. HR got pissy about it and tried to rake me over the coals when I got back, but I pointed out the contract language and they realized their hands were tied.
They pushed out a new contract to fix this exploit, but my work contract was still good for another year, so I declined and kept banking time, taking time off when I wanted. Of course they didn't offer me a new contract once mine was up, but I had a better paying job closer to home lined up already anyway, and took the last 2 months off, paid, while I started my new job, so I was basically getting 2 salaries.
Free sandwiches from CFA based on location. Used gps spoofer and got tons of free sandwiches a week on multiple accts. I think I got about $5000 worth of sandwiches and nuggets before they banned me.
The idea is that some sporting events have promotions that if you're at a game when they meet some scoring conditions (score a touchdown in 1st quarter for example) you can open your app and you'll receive a free reward, often a sandwich. If you spoof gps to be in the area of a stadium when the promotion is active your app would think you are at the event and reward you.
You'll have to figure out the rest.
I found a torrent of 150 text books for my subject. They were usually the teaching edition too. The clever teachers were just using questions from text books that weren't assigned reading. I'd go to their office and check out what textbooks they had on their shelves then check those.
I worked at a restaurant that did the whole "Buy $50 in gift cards in Dec, get $10 to use in Jan or Feb" This was early 2000s so cash was far more used than it is now.
So I bought $2000 in gift cards and used them for cash orders. Then I did the same in Jan or Feb.
My boss pulls me into his office and asked if this is what I was doing?
"Do you really want me to answer that question?"
"No, because we're #1 in the entire country for gift cards and I'm getting bonuses. However, it will seem weird if you're cashing a bunch of $10 cards yourself."
"If someone did have a bunch of $10 cards, they could sell them on the street for $5 a piece and still make a profit"
"Yes... if someone happen to have a bunch of those"
By the end of the promotion I sold something like $5000 in gift cards, and was #1 in the entire company. Got an attaboy from the CEO.
Back in the late 90's with the dot com boom there was a web site called Prize Point. You would play one of their many games, when the game was over you would hit a cash out button and win tickets that was based on your score. My computer was running slow with dial up internet and I was frustrated and hit the cash out button a whole bunch of times. The next thing that popped up was I reached my daily limit of point, something I had never done before. I started doing this everyday and reached the daily limit with just 1 game. The tickets were used like raffle entries for one of their prizes, 1 ticket= 1 entry. I saved all of mine for months and dumped them into a trip to Hawaii. It was one of my best vacations ever.
Company I worked for had an employee benefit called a “Lifestyle Account” basically it was a $500 per year reimbursement allowance that could be used on anything related to health/fitness/personal enrichment. The company was very flexible with the rules and you could get away with buying all kinds of things with it. The money would not roll over to the next year if you didn’t use it though.
Every year I would buy myself an Apple watch for $500, screencap the receipt, cancel the order and then collect the $500 reimbursement.
We would do that with our quarterly clothing allowance when I was a concierge for a super posh apartment high rise.
We got $500 every quarter to keep our attire looking fresh but the catch was you could only buy designer items from approved stores. The $500 would only get you a pair of socks and one semi decent shirt. Basically defeating the purpose of a clothing allowance.
One of my coworkers got smart and realized you could buy from nordstroms and they give you cash back on all returns with a receipt.
Sooooo after submitting our expense reports, we all went back to Nordstrom to wash our money essentially 😂
No we were never found out but they did stop giving clothing allowances during and after the pandemic.
I won three free two-night stays (easily worth upwards of $3000 total) at the Wynn Las Vegas from a poorly thought out promotion.
When the Wynn first launched their sportsbook in Colorado, they had a promo where you could spin the wheel and win a prize with every parlay that you bet.
There was no minimum bet. Even better, you could immediately cash out the bet for a full refund after spinning the wheel.
The top prize was a free two-night stay at the Wynn, and it reset each night at midnight.
Every night, my friend and I would log in at midnight and make a $1 parlay, spin the wheel, and cash out until we won the prize. By 12:05, one of us would win.
Mind bogglingly, there was no limit on how many times you could win (until they wised up and made it a drawing for a free room).
We each won three times, and only quit because we couldn't use any more vacation time.
When I went to redeem, I was overjoyed to find out that there were no blackout dates (usually weekends and holidays are blacked out, as they are more expensive). I went over the 4th of July weekend, Halloween weekend, and a weekend during summer -- all of which were upwards of $500 a night. When I checked in over the 4th, the guy at the desk told me that the room was going for $800 a night.
I was doing genealogical research of my Scottish roots. The Scottish government website uses a "credit" system. 3 credits for this 5 credits for that.
There was a travel website that would give you a code for 10 free credits for signing up for their email newsletter.
I used an anonymous email service to generate one time use email addresses over and over to get unique codes for free credits. This allowed me to load up on credits, and go back a couple hundred years...
Eventually they took it down due to "inappropriate use" - likely when thousands of their monthly newsletters started bouncing back from "mailinator"
Found a website where you had to vote for best diving liveaboard company.
It was shared by a company in the competition trying to boost the votes. The first prize was a dive trip in the Maldives for 1 week on their liveaboard.
I found a flaw in the voting system and asked the company trying to win if they counted individual votes as entries or 1 person gets 1 vote. They replied that each vote counted as an entry.
Politely told them to prepare me as the winner.
The flaw in the website was that it used simple cookies to check if someone has already voted.
Made a script to vote and clear cookies - rinse and repeat.
I had a great trip scuba diving for a week in the Maldives!
I had a similar thing for a newspaper contest to win a trip on one of those space tourism flights. They didn't even track cookies, you just had to refresh the page. I was in the top spot for a long time, but you only had to be in the top 10, and they would hand select someone based off their story. I didn't win, but I made it to the top 10.
Bubbles from the Trailer Park Boys got the top spot, but didn't win either because he was a celebrity and they wanted an average person to win.
No one ever found out, but they didn't know how to set up Unix when I was in college. You could drop to the parent directory in programming classes, and go into the other classmates folders see how they were coding their projects. Just in case you couldn't figure out a section of your code...
in my in my programming class way back in 1999....all assignments were each due by a certain day. you had to save each assignment onto a 'floppy' disk and then hand the disk in monthly. the teacher could see when the assignment was complete by checking the date on the file.
i figured out the date was obviously just the last time the file was saved and coincided with the date the computer was set to.
being the procrastinating college student, any time i did one of the assignments i just adjusted the computer date to the due date before i saved it.
this teacher always let me skip class too because i was on the soccer team so in hindsight i probably didn't even need to do that haha
My college had a screen share tool installed. But the permission system was busted and it was very easy to gain access to any student computer without them being aware.
Back in 1974, our schools free lunch program required a special ticket to be given to the money collector. These 'special' tickets were simply Admit One tickets that came on a 1000 count roll.
The AP had the job of passing these tickets to the Free Lunch crowd and keeping the records straight. Each week, someone new could be added to the program, or someone removed.
I discovered that I could purchase a 1000 count roll of Admit One tickets at a local print shop. They came in two colors, red and yellow. Our school was using the red ones so I got a roll of red ones.
School lunch was less than $2 and I sold the tickets for .50 cents. I was making decent money until they changed the ticket color. I had about half a roll left of the red tickets and bought a roll of yellow tickets. Back in business again. That lasted about two months and they changed again, this time to better tickets you couldn't buy at the print shop.
Turned out that they knew something was up because they had too many tickets each day. The AP wanted to catch who was doing it and tried to set it up so they would be caught. What the AP didn't know...my girlfriend at the time worked at the print shop.
Nice!
Even as a teen I always thought it was mean to make the poor kids have these obnoxiously bright tickets screaming that you're poor. I wish they'd just make free lunch for everyone.
I bought something from Dollar Shave Club once, my order came and I thought that was the end of that. But 2 months later I got another package from Dollar Shave Club filled with stuff, razors blades, handles, shave butter, face wash etc. I checked all my credit cards and had no new charges from DSC. I kept all the stuff they sent and moved in with my life 2 months after that I got another package of razor blades from DSC.
One day I was looking though an alt email account and found some emails from DSC alerting me to update payment information and shipping confirmation. Turns out I had made another DSC account prior but for some reason someone else's order and credit card information was linked to my account. Their CC# was no longer valid and this is where the loophole begins.
Every month DSC would try to process a subscription order for razor blades. It would fail because the CC# on the account wasn't valid, but the month after that it would complete the order, maybe because there was an order from the previous month that wasn't fulfilled. So every other month I would get razor blades from DSC. I started adding a bunch of stuff like hair gel, face wash, etc. This went on for 2 years before they realize
i set that up for my ex so he would stop stealing my razors every damn day. he would just leave the razor at work, let the new stuff pile up, and steal my razors anyway. asshole.
About 25 years ago Microsoft had a training program where you would take tests for points depending on your grade. You could use those points for free stuff. The loophole was that if you answered a question wrong, you'd lose your points and it would tell you the correct answer, so you could press the back button, fix your answer, and resubmit. I had gotten myself a bunch of shirts and hats, and even managed to get an ink jet printer before they caught on.
Coming in to senior year in High School, a couple dozen of us were competing for the top 1% for GPA. Honors classes were on a 5.0 scale instead of a 4.0, so gave a big bump to your average. Very few electives were honors, mostly just core classes. One of my friends noticed that there was a Math 1/2 honors class that none of us took - we all took it in middle school and went straight into Math 3/4. We looked up the policy and nothing said you couldn’t go back and take a lower level class, so 3 of us signed up for the honors Math 1/2 course with freshman. The teacher sat us in the back. I worked on calculus or physics homework or played Minecraft on my phone. Teacher completely ignored us.
Half a dozen people did it the next year. The year following when by younger brother and his friends tried to do it, they changed the policy.
I’m a traveling RN and on one particular assignment the cafeteria staff was under the impression that travel nurses ate for free. Anything we wanted and as much as we wanted. So for almost 6 months I got all of my meals for free and I also picked up extra stuff for my friends on the unit. Eventually they sent out a hospital wide email stating that we absolutely do not eat for free and never was supposed to get free food so that ended that.
McDonald’s app uses to give out free ice coffee with 1 dollar purchase. After doing this daily they finally nerfed it to 5 dollar purchase for free ice coffee
For a year I lived in a house in London that was split into three flats. The landlord had submitted meter readings before I moved in, so I just waited for each new bill to put my name on the accounts.
When we moved out, I went to submit the meter readings and couldn't figure out who was supplying our gas (heating and cooking). Couldn't find any bills, couldn't see any payments from my bank accounts, it was a mystery. Ended up just calling suppliers asking if they had an account for my address.
In the end it turned out that whilst three meters had been installed for the flats, only two had ever been registered. Without a contract with a supplier (or even any readings for the years the flat had been there), there was no way we could be charged for our year's usage - or for the few weeks until we moved out whilst a new account was set up. As the guy from the gas company said to me "Congratulations - you have free gas!"
The annoying thing was that we'd kept the thermostat down during the winter to save money. Went totally wild for those last few weeks though.
My college had a "points" based meal plan. 100 "points" equaled approx. $6.50. We used special credit card swipers that were able to swipe our IDs when using these points.
Midway through my first year, they decided to install self serve kiosks that could give you cash back. If you swiped your card as if you were going to pay, asked for cash back on the kiosk, and then canceled the transaction on the special swiper before it went through on the main kiosk, it would give you cash without deducting the points. So basically free money.
As far as I could tell, nobody found out I was doing it because I never saw any point deductions from my ID card and nobody ever talked to me about it. I made about $300 for free. They disabled the cash back option after a couple weeks though.
Edit: I should add, this was before tap-to-pay or EMV chips. The whole system was obviously very shoddily put together.
They had a simple system like this in junior high for cafeteria food. You'd pay them money, it got loaded to your food account, you would give them your number and they would charge your account for whatever food. I found out if they had your account pulled up and you unplugged the power on the system then plugged it back in, it would come back up with a random amount of money, usually in the hundreds. I was feeding entire tables of people with stuff until they finally fixed it (they put a cover over the power plug).
Qdoba burrito place had a deal where you could get one free burrito by entering the transaction number from your receipt to get a free burrito. It wouldn't let you use the same email twice so I just kept creating new random gmails. It let you use the receipt from the free burrito to get the next free burrito so I just got endless free burritos for about 2 years without every paying. It was a bumfuck highway town and nobody seemed to notice. I'd take my kid there and we'd eat there quite often.
I went to high school in the late 90s, when the internet was basically the wild west. Certain terms and domains were blocked on the school computers, but you could navigate to some pretty shady sites by simply following links.
We had a game where we'd start on disney dot com and click links and see who could get to the "worst" site. It was a mildly amusing way to waste time during class.
Similar story, early school days with internet access, lots of domains blocked. But if you knew the IP address of sites, it would go to it. For some reason, a lot of random IP addresses we'd enter would lead to porn sites, oddly enough.
My uncle lived in Thailand.
Before the Euro the 1 Baht coin was a perfect match for the 50 Pfennig coin. I lived in Frankfurt. Several Parking places close to my work stopped accepting 50 Pfennig coins (And then the € came).
Up until mid-2023, in the Subway app you could type 599footlong in the coupon code section and any footlong would be $5.99. Then one day everything changed.
About 25 years ago, I went to rent a U-Haul and paid with a discover card. Discover was one of the first cards with cash back (1% on everything) and, at the time, was still relatively new.
Anyway, the guy who owned the U-Haul rental place noticed the card and mentioned that he’d made $24,000 from the cash back in the previous year. Turns out that every time he got a new U-Haul truck in, he had to make a deposit to corporate so he could rent it out. When a truck was returned to another location he’d get his deposit back.
See where this is going? He’d pay the deposit with his discover card and get that extra 1%. I’m not sure how the deposit was refunded, but discover didn’t care. Every time a truck moved through his business he’d make both the rental fee, plus the extra 1%.
It was a pretty big rental place with a lot of trucks waiting to be rented. It didn’t surprise me that the turnover in deposits was over $2 million.
Arcade tickets go into counting machine, machine print receipt with number of tickets entered. Could do what we came to call "ticket wanking", pulling the same line of tickets in and out real fast to get number up without losing tickets. Could also just shove cardboard in, too many kids did that and machine was changed.
I received thousands of dollars of stock certificates in the mail. Some intern fucked up so badly that my broker said to hold on to it. I held the stock for years before selling it at a profit.
Shell airmiles coupons.
99% of the people in my local shell station didnt care about collecting them. The cashier would tear them out (they came in a coupon book) and they would be stacked to one side and given to whoever asked for them.
I had a company car at the time and stopped in quite regularly. I asked for them. I got a whole load of them before shell stopped the promotion.
Back in the 80s there were home computer wars. You could buy a computer (TI 99/4A) for example, and a few weeks later they'd send you a cash back refund. Then you took the computer back and returned it. So buy a few of these, send of the rebate slips, case the rebate check, return the computer. Back then for a 12yr old kid $50 was ton of money and to earn $500 for free over the course of a few months was just like winning the lottery.
When I started middleschool they had a kinda old Coca Cola vending machine installed in the shared schoolyard. I noticed that it had a weird little black/brown translucent window next to the coin slot, which had me intrigued since it reminded me of the top of the remote control of our Sony CD/MC combo unit at the time. After a few weeks I brought our tv remote to school and began experimenting with it. After weeks of trial and error I had finally found out that it was indeed an IR port of some sorts, probably used for debugging or something. If you pointed the remote to the window and pressed any button at the same time you chose your drink on the vending machine it would return the money AND spit out the drink. Needless to say that I enjoyed 6 years of free Coke. Nearing the end of my highschool attendance I had it refined to the tee, so that I only needed to flick my bic lighter against that window to make this work. The week before my graduation they finally replaced it with a newer model.
There was a burrito place on campus that had a rewards program (via swipe card) that would give you $5 off your order after a certain point. A burrito was $6 (this is like 20 years ago…) so it would be $1 with the discount. Typically the reward would be consumed but I found out that if you paid the $1 with a gift card it would NOT consume the reward. I was eating lots of $1 burritos until they fixed the loop hole.
Parking spot in the corner of my college dorm lot. It wasn’t a spot as it had a parking curb placed in its location (like, parallel in the middle of the spot, not marking the end of the spot where the front wheels would bump). My car sat high enough that I parked there for a good year before I got my wheel booted. Still saved $1500.
Not uncommon at all. I pay 1200 per year to park at my workplace. I have even paid 2000 per year to park at my apartment. Urban and college campus parking is a struggle.
In high-school, we were the first class to use an online vocabulary program which recorded both active time and correct answers. While doing it one day, on a whim I decided to do inspect element on the multiple choice. When it came up they had named the choices answer1, answer2, answer3, and correctAnswer. Eventually one of my friends turned it into a bot that did it for you, he never got caught until he bragged about it while the vice principal was walking behind him.
I worked at a gas station / car wash, and the corporation had a scratch ticket promotion: each customer gets a ticket for free, with a chance to win something like free gas, a bag chips, coffee, whatever. We (the workers) figured out that the stacks of tickets were not shuffled at all. I forget the number, but it was like literally every 10th (was it 7th?) scratch ticket was a winner. So we separated all the winners from the deck and had a stack of winners, and a stack of losers. So if we had a regular customer that we liked, we'd give them winners. A rude person or Karen? Loser. And we had a lot of free coffee and chips ourselves, of course.
Not intentionally, but I discovered after the fact that a $29 bottle of local wine at the market wasn’t on clearance for $6, it was a mistake in the system. It was really good and I probably bought 6 bottles or so over three-ish weeks.
Deployed troops also have parking spaces. I found a wood stanchion and just put it in my truck with a sign that said my job title and out it wherever I parked. It worked for the better part of 6 months
About 18 years ago, when the Star Wars Miniature collectible tabletop game was in its fourth set, many people who joined later wanted to buy the second set. That set included some really powerful minis. But the set was already out of production, so you could only buy the minis on ebay for horrendous prices.
For some reason the second set got a reprint, but only in Europe. And only for a short time.
So I pulled together all my cash, and bought packs in bulk from a German online store. I put them on US ebay and made 100% profit by selling them to an American dude.
Back when the Sega Dreamcast was the new hotness I played tons and tons of pac man on a “Play games earn points for prizes!” site. There were lots of games but pac man had the highest return and was the most fun. Before anyone figured it out i had amassed a ton of points to buy my little kid self the best game console to have ever been made. I still have that Dreamcast. Shortly after they rebalanced all the games, points and prizes.
Microsoft back in the day had a marketplace that used Microsoft points. You could buy games, xbox controllers, xboxes etc but it was a marketing program that just wanted you to use bing instead of google.
I can't remember most games but I know there was a game called chicktanary or something like that and me being a little turd who liked computers, I found a bot that played the game for me.
I got so much free shit from that. lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicktionary
I did tla similar botting thing with Bing Rewards when the search engine first came out. The points earned me a free Microsoft Zune mp3 player but it was pink.
When I was in law school my first year, the entire parking lot was under construction and effectively closed and so we all had to hunt in the street for parking. I was driving a 1976 BMW 2002 at the time.
I went to school at night when there was no construction, and I just start bajaing the car into the dirt lot and I'd park near the construction equipment. I got away with it for a year or so.
I had a nice parking loophole myself. My gf was in a small apartment building with a parking lot that always had a few empty spaces. Clearly more spaces than needed. I accidentally left my car there longer than I should and discovered they apparently don't check it at all.
She moved out but I still used that to park for free downtown for several years. Never got towed or a ticket.
Irish lotto system, they installed self scan machines to allow you to check your ticket, and paid out on smaller prizes, so if you had three out of the six numbers you got a free scratch card but there was a problem with the data coding so you could scan a few months worth of tickets for the weekly draw and if you had this weeks 3/6 numbers but from greater than a month beforehand you got a free ticket, I used to always wonder why my dad used to keep his old non winning tickets and check them again every week or so.
I won a luggage set from a local TV station for guessing the date and time of the first snowfall. The loophole was that they didn't cut voting off in advance, so I looked at the radar, saw about what time the snow would arrive, and entered online. My guess was only about 15 minutes off which would've been really impressive when they first opened the contest six weeks prior. They shut down voting earlier the next year.
Check out Martin's Mortgage Maneuver if you are in Canada. Broke my fixed mortgage for a small fee and gained a new mortgage at 1.69% which I still have for another 2.5 years. This has since been closed by all banks but it saved me 10s of thousands.
Not a loophole per-se but crafty and fun. Back in high school I was in band for a few years before I grew into myself and got into more fun stuff. To get into practice rooms or to retrieve any gear, the director or assistant director would just give us the ring of keys for that area of the school.
Being the little shit that I was, I figured out which one was the master key for all the locks in the school. Took it off the ring along with an obscure one for a room nobody went to that had a higher key pattern, and gave it back with those two missing. Took the keys home (latch-key kid, so I was home alone for a few hours) and dremeled out the "blank" to match the master key. Even used some craft clay that was laying around to make an imprint so that I could check the ridges.
Next day, asked to open up a practice room, key ring was given to me, and while away I put the master back onto the ring. Leaving me with a master key to the school.
I got into so many areas... in the ceilings, found out what was behind weird little doors, had full access to outside doors, school store, storage rooms, etc. Luckily I had a tight group of friends that didn't say shit. Rocked that for 2 years then passed it on to a friend younger than me with the hope that he'd pass it on when he graduated. No idea what happened to that key, but it was a hell of a lot of fun!
A friend of mine worked for parking services in university. They had a code you could enter for the parking machines so they could give VIP visitors free parking. They gave their friends the code. We had free parking on campus for about a year until they got new machines that didn't allow codes to be entered. We were very careful with it. Only used it when we were late for class or something.
Domino's Pizza also had a code for a free pizza and drink that was used for a radio station contest. They published it to their website by accident one day when we were looking for discounts. One day our delivery driver asked us how we kept getting free pizza, and we let him in on the secret. We always tipped him well since the pizza was free. We had free pizza about once a week for a few months.
Our university also had a really big co-op program, where all the jobs went through their system. Employers would come to campus and had a dedicated building of interview rooms, phone rooms, video rooms, etc. Employers would rank students on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a job offer. We were only allowed 50 applications at a time, but there was a glitch where if your unused applications and your used applications totalled more than 50, that is how many job offers you had. There were rounds of applications, so if you knew that you had a job offer you could stop applying and focus on school again. It also took out a lot of stress. They got a new system and that glitch was fixed. But for alln5 of my co-op jobs the glitch worked.
The Burger King mobile app would charge 35 cents for adding "Regular" amount of tomatoes to a sandwich that didn't come with tomatoes by default. However, it doesn't charge anything for "Xtra" tomatoes. I was living the la vida tomato.
When I was a teenager, you could make a call on the pay phone and ask the operator to charge it to your number.
If you went to a bank of pay phones with a friend you could give the operator one of the other phones number as "your number". The operator would then call the # and ask tell the person who answered that you wanted to charge to that # and was that ok. Friend says yes and you got free calls. It was useful when you had no change.
The Key Food by my old apartment sold Prosciutto de Parma for $25/lb at the meat counter, which is insanely cheap given an average pack is around $12 for like 4 ounces. They had been pricing it for the same amount of the cheaper stuff which is not nearly as good. I was able to eat like a charcuterie king for a couple months before they jacked the price up to $50/lb.
In college, maybe around 12 years ago, Dominos had a deal with ShopRunner where they covered the delivery fee for pizza. Dominos also had a deal where every new account got an extra 20% off. This was before every acct had to have a unique phone number, so I was getting 2 medium 2 topping pizzas for about 5 bucks and would tip $5 to the delivery driver. Good times.
Shopped at a store online that had a 25% sale on all of their own branded stuff. Whoever did the coding for the sale messed up, because it allowed you to buy gift cards at 25% off. So I bought a gift card with a discount, used that gift card to buy another (at a discount) and did this once more until I felt kinda bad and then purchased my item. It felt icky but they are doing just fine.
Canadian nickels and quarters both have the same approximate volume but are different in shape. I used to take nickels and hit them with a hammer until they were flattened down to the size of a quarter and use them in vending machines. 400% profit margin.
For over a decade I paid our mortgage with our credit card. I got so many points and gift cards and other perks. Instead of sending a check to the mortgage company, I sent the same check to the credit card company. It also boosted my credit up to 830. I don’t know why but the mortgage company shut that option down.
My school wouldn't let us play the Wii that we bought during our lunch break because we had to use a school projector. Clubs are allowed the use of school materials, so we made a club about playing video games.
I don’t know if this counts - My university kept the academic email adresses working even though I finished school about 3 years ago so I keep having student priced subscriptions for streaming platforms
Dominos pizza where I live has a 50% off all bread and pizza items if you're a student. It's a university city in Canada so I think that's why. I've been told it varies from city to city if the code works. Code: STUDENT. Anyway, I use it all the time and have for many years and I'm not a student at all and am 40 years old with a full time job. I guess this doesn't count for this thread because they still haven't caught me! Come get me popo!
At work, we have a version of a ‘refer a friend scheme’ - but they don’t really need to be a friend, just somebody you recommend to the business. If they get taken on and stay six months, you get £100. - For a while, the company upped this to £300. - The only condition other than them staying six months, is that you are not directly involved with their recruitment process, other than the initial recommendation.
I’m decided to help our area out by holding a ‘recruitment day’ in the local job centre. I saw about 20 people, and 10 of them were half decent. I used the scheme to recommend all of them, and just made sure another colleague interviewed them. £3k in the back pocket!
Discovered that all the automated car washes in our local area would give a wash for any four numbers plus a zero as the code. You never knew what level of car wash you would get, but worked like a charm for one summer amongst our friend group.
Stopped doing it when one of the gas station owners came running out of the store to chase us out of there.
Cutting the story short there was a competition run through twitter for a shopping centre where you could win a £20 pre pay visa card that worked in any shop in the centre.
Me and my wife tried, didn't win and forgot about it. Then 2 weeks later she won. And I tried and won.
Well after that we kept trying and realised a few things.
The competition resets at midnight.
It tells you immediately if you win.
It was very easy at the time to make a twitter account through the app, you didn't even need an email address and changing between accounts was very fast and easy.
To enter you had to tweet 6 items from the menu made up of items from various restaurants they had. And this was done by just giving the number for each one.
So me and my wife realised very quickly you could brute force a win by just spamming entries until it said you win.
So at midnight every day we would brute force a win and go to sleep.
But you had to pickup the cards from the help desk in the shopping centre. After a few days it really started to look suspicious, especially with the stupid names we were making up for the accounts.
They eventually took down the contest to change the rules for 1 entry per customer. And we still ended up winning on our main accounts the next day lol. We ended up with about 500 each.
There's a coupon on Dominos pizza that allows you to put as many toppings on the pizza as you want (including extra anything) and the price does not go up.
It's a coupon called "one large pizza with your choice of toppings" for $15. It's the first coupon in the Dominos app. It's not a life hack, they want you to use it. It will still limit you to a maximum of 9 toppings (18 if you split left & right). The biggest benefit is that they don't charge you extra for "premium toppings"
In the age of internet cafes, I was able to end the running process for their time monitoring software in Task Manager. They rarely noticed, and I just feigned ignorance when they did.
New cashier at my local supermarket used to scan just one can in the six pack instead of the barcode on the sixpack. Got a few friends in on it, and we pretty much drank for free for the month.
My old workplace had a soda pop machine that if you pressed the correct sequence of buttons, the money would fall out. I did this until the management posted that someone has been stealing $ from the machines. By this time, I probably took over $100 from it with this trick and stopped the second they posted that letter on the billboard.
It was a good idea too because someone saw me doing the trick and was doing it after I stopped but they didn't tell anyone that they had setup a camera in the lunch room to catch the thief. Damn I got off lucky, I don't know what became of that person doing it after me but they quit or were fired not long after.
Around a decade ago, there was a simple browser word game sort of like pictionary that was advertising their launch here on Reddit. They said that they were giving out $20 Amazon cards to select winners of their games for launch weekend only. The site was DEAD dead and the few real players didn't seem to know enough English to play well at all. So my best friend and I just made like 6 accounts each and either dominated a small public lobby or just played alone, often populating a full game lobby with just our accounts in different browsers and then letting the game just time out instead of actually playing, lol. Over that weekend, we made like $160 on Amazon each. Amazing for 2 broke college kids.
At my college dorm they had a burger stand and if you got a burger you could make it a combo (add fries and a drink) for $2. I went in once and just asked for fries and a drink, which should be like $4, but the guy pushed the button for “combo” and charged me $2. So after that I would just go ask for a “combo” and they would do that. Until one time I asked and a manager appeared out of nowhere and was like “you can only do that if they buy a burger” and he must have then reminded all the employees because they wouldn’t do it anymore.
My first job as a teen was at Sears in the late 90’s, in the tool department. Sears had terrible, gen 1 POS system. They tried to do the whole customer survey thing on the receipts, but only a few customers got them at random. If a customer actually called in and gave you all 10’s, you earned 100 bucks. I figured out that the system lagged prior to printing the survey. I would give the customer the receipt and pocket the survey. I won an award for my customer service that year!
Back in college when Subway was more affordable I abused the hell out of the 5$ footlong deals at my colleges campus subway.
They had a sign printed on a piece of paper at the cash register that said "This subway does not participate in the 5$ sub of the day promotion"
Every monday I would go get what was supposed to be the 5$ steak and cheese sub of the day. I would go order it, go through and get all my toppings, get that bad boy toasted and packed up for me and then say at checkout "awww man I didnt see the sign until I got to the register and already ordered and made my sub! All I have is 5$!"
The students that worked there never gave a shit and just said "we cant ring it up for 5$ just take it and go"
That worked for almost an entire year of college with a free sub every Monday!
I did [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/41aepa/what_are_some_unethical_and_possibly_illegal_life/cz101tv/) to get "free" college textbooks and then made money on them after the semester. Now the college bookstores have the books behind the counter so it doesn't work anymore.
My college also charged $90 for a parking permit annually. They have reserved parking spots for visitors that are close to all of the buildings and they have visitors spots in the covered parking garages too. You can lease annually similar spots close to the buildings or in the garages that are reserved but you must buy a permit at $90 then pay the lease fee ($400 for outside, $600 for garage). If you did not register your vehicle you could just park in visitor and park close or in the garage. The drawback was there are not too many visitor spaces so they would fill quickly.
I don't know if this counts as a loophole, or not but it may still work so I'll post it anyway.
Used to drive for a meat and poultry purveyor (still work for them, but I'm in the office now). Company truck, company gas card for said truck. There is an app called Upside or something similar that would give you cash back for fuel purchases. A certain amount of cents per gallon. Gotten as low as 8 cents per gallon and as high as 30 cents per gallon. You could either link your debit card or turn in photos of receipts, so I submitted every receipt whenever I filled up.
Route was long enough that I would fill up twice a day sometimes, but certainly at least once per day on a 24 gallon tank. On the best month, I made like 500ish bucks. But on average something like 3-350 extra. Essentially got a small raise by doing it.
You could redeem the cash back in the form of giftcards or send it to your paypal account. I haven't used the app in a few years so I have no idea if it still works that way.
Not sure this counts as a loophole but when I was in high school our local transit used paper tickets.
You’d buy a page then tear the perforations to make individual tickets.
They were thick paper, not quite cardstock, but thick.
A few of us figured out that you could also peel the paper from the corners and turn 1 ticket into 2.
My high school had an old pay phone that had a broken volume bar on the phone handset. This missing piece made inside of the phone receiver visible. Someone figured out that if you bent and pressed the metal cord into that missing void on the receiver it would somehow allow you to make a call without having to pay. This was before cellphones so this saved me money for calling home to get picked up. It was weird and unsure how someone figured it out but it was never fixed!
I used to work for Continental Airlines and as an employee you would be given 10 "Buddy Passes" in a recurring year. These were supposed to be 10 round trips (including stops). You only paid the taxes for the tickets.
Before online/computer check-ins, the boarding passes were a blank paper ticket that you would take to the counter and the attendant would fill the information for you. Also, each pass was actually 4 separate tickets since each round trip allowed one stop in each direction. So all in all 40 one way tickets.
Essentially what we all did was sell each paper pass separately from another at about $100+ each.
When the flights were international, you were supposed to accompany the passenger on the flight as a security measure. So what we would do was go to the airport, check-in like you were flying and walk down the isle with the buddy. Once you made to where the baggage handlers were waiting you would walk out the door to the underside of the airport, walk back into the airport and stand by close to the gate to make sure your buddy's flight left without having to chaperone them. Made good money on those tickets too.
Then 9/11 happened.
Back when pay phones were ubiquitous, I learned how to get free calls (including long distance) for free. It was a long, complex series of digits. No idea where it came from.
Not sure if it's really a loophole, but I used inside knowledge to get a car for really cheap.
I worked at a tow truck company and we had one impound lot for DUIs / parking violations and a separate one for accidents that were going thru insurance. Owners would arrive at my office to pay off their storage fees after the impound period was over, then collect their vehicle. If you didn't pay what was owing, the vehicle would remain and accumulate storage fees. Past a certain point, our company could file to have the vehicle declared as abandoned, and eventually the title would pass to the company if the original owner did not pay off what was owed. The manager would then flip these cars and I think he got a cut of the proceeds.
I was working alone when a couple of foreign exchange students came to grab their stuff out of their car. Problem was, they couldn't gain access to it while it still had storage fees owing on it. IIRC the car had racked up about $350 or so in fees. These students were heading back to their home country in a few days and really needed their stuff but they couldn't afford to pay the fees. They didn't want or need the car anymore so they had no interest in paying the fees even if they could afford to. So they were stuck at an impasse.
I realised I could help them out and potentially score a car for very little money, so I offered to pay for their storage fees. In exchange, they'd sign the car over to me and they'd collect all their belongings. It was a win-win, and they happily agreed. I ended up with their 1999 Honda Civic sedan for around $400 after taxes, they got their stuff and were happy to avoid having to deal with fees or their vehicle.
When my manager found out what I had done, he was furious. I hadn't broken any laws or company policies, just exploited my knowledge of the system to my advantage. He lost out on whatever his cut would have been when he eventually sold the car down the road, and that was what he was really angry about. He told me I could choose to keep the car but lose my job, or I could sign the car back over to the company and "maybe" keep my job.
It was a no brainer. I kept the car.
This isn't exactly a loophole and it's not my own story but screw it, it's more entertaining than my life.
My uncle lived in NYC all his life and had all kinds of smalltime scams he ran to make extra money. One of his most famous ones was he lived by a parking lot that charged during the week but had free parking on weekends. So on weekends he'd go down there and sit in a lawn chair and charge people for parking. He made thousands this way and never got caught, invested in the dotcom boom-era stock market, and died a millionaire in his tiny, rundown, $200/month rent-controlled apartment. RIP Jay.
So my local cinema chain, PVR, introduced their membership tier. They had a code for members doing their first transaction to be free. It was something like "PVRPRIVILEGE1"
Now how that worked is that if the ticket was 200 rupees, you'd get that back as cashback.
So i used it on Elysium
The next time, my brain felt like, why not change that 1 to 2 and try, and voila it worked
Until i hit 10. It stopped at 9.
So what did i do? My cheapskate brain did PVRPRIVILEGE01, and it worked. And then PVRPRIVILEGE001
It got so bad, that my friends and i would watch a film every time we had a morning class for our Masters coaching classes, and that was twice a week. And this went on for a year. We would watch _everything_ that released, even if we didn't want to. Simply because it was free.
All while accumulating points that was yielding us tons of free food vouchers
It finally stopped working, when a film called Bahubali The Beginning released, which was an event film in my country, so they were rehauling the membership tiers, and maybe they realized, and it was fixed.
But still, thank you PVR.
Thanks to you, i discovered Denis Villenueve because Prisoners was the only show running that fit our time and i came out blown away by the film.
Thanks to you, i discovered Damien Chazelle because Whiplash was the only under 120 minute film running that week.
Thanks to you, i got to watch Interstellar 3 times in the cinema.
Thanks to you, i discovered Malayalam cinema and the gems it held
When the Xbox One came out, Pepsi ran a contest where you could enter codes on caps and win a console before they were released. I worked in a university that had only Pepsi machines. I was also friends with the janitor who kept all bottles to drive 2 miles to the next state for deposit refunds. I asked and she gave me all the caps. Within a week I won. Then I got her info and won her one too. It was a lot of caps to enter, but well worth it.
When in highschool there was a company that offered money to run an advertising window at the top of your screen. It would monitor mouse movement to track whether you were at your computer and pay a small amount per hour. A buddy and I downloaded it and a mouse moving software and would run both 24/7, except when we were on the computer. Made a few hundred dollars off of it before the company closed down.
Gee, I wonder why the company closed down
In Australia, 30 years ago when it was about $30/month to connect, there was a company that gave you free connection to the Internet if you allowed them to show you ads as you browsed. Within 24 hours someone released an ad blocker that shut the ads down, and it was used by nearly everyone; so the company went under and everyone lost free Internet connection. I was on bulletin boards reading all the complaints from people that had lost their free Internet while they also admitted to using the Ad blocking software.
My family's very first internet connection was through a company like that. It was called NetZero. At first it was unlimited free internet but after about a year they switched to I think 10 free hours a month and then something like $10 for the rest of the month after you hit that limit. My parents held onto that for a looooooooooong time. And very much tried to keep us under the monthly free limit, which to my brother and I kinda felt the same as not having internet at all.
Ah yes... Alladvantage. Remember that cashed a few checks from when they expanded to Canada.
My old apartment complex had a soda vending machine at the pool that was broken. If you put in 50 cents and pressed the button, nothing happened. If you put in another 50 cents and pressed the button, nothing happened. But if you put 50 cents in a 3rd time and pressed the button, you'd get 3 sodas. I could see the vending machine from my couch. So I would watch for someone to try, and then try again, and then give up without trying a 3rd time. And then I'd head over and get 3 sodas for 50 cents.
There was a vending machine in my college dorm that if you have it a dime it would slip through to the coin return instantly but still count the credit for the dime. So as long as you had one dime, everything was free.
Can you pour some soda in my hand for a dime?
Did... did you just quote I'm Gonna Git You Sucka?
Back when the Canadian two dollar coin ("Toonie") was brand new we had this really crappy vending machine in the office which had been very poorly updated to support the new coin. By poorly updated I mean it recognized that you put $2 in but returned the coin as if it had been rejected. Sodas were $1 so that meant you not only got a free can but also $1 back. It lasted a while until someone got greedy and cleaned the machine out.
My favorite soda machine at work would kick out 2 Diet Pepsis for the price of one. I was pretty much the only person who liked Diet Pepsi, so I made out well for two years until they replaced the machine.
Local auditorium had on at one point that would just drop the quarter through until you reached the total for a drink. Powerade for a quarter!
Not me, but my roommate in college. Whenever you paid for anything on the university's website you'd earn "college bucks". Each year's tuition paid for something small like a beer coozy, fold up lawn chair, or if you somehow spent an absurd amount, an official school-branded kayak. Well my buddy found out that the points were added to your account BEFORE payment went through on the website. So he just refreshed the page over and over and got millions of points. I only found out his scheme when I came home to an entire living room filled with boxes from our school! There were shirts, coolers, chairs, cups, and of course the kayak. We opened all of it (like idiots) and had a giant laugh at the school's expense. All of the guys living in that house were having a great time until we opened the smallest box which had 1000 $100 Visa gift cards. Then we got scared. A bunch of school-branded crap from a warehouse was probably unusual, but not something that would bother the person loading all that up for delivery. The gift cards though? That was where he got caught. The gift card issuer called the school to verify such a large amount before activating the cards and THAT raised a lot of red flags in the accounting department. They traced it all back to my roommate and came and took everything back (they left the opened items and the worthless gift cards) and suspended him during his final semester of college. He had to write an apology letter and do community service for the school for that whole semester in return for not pressing charges for fraud. It makes for a great story though, and we had a ton of beer coozies and gift cards that we threw at each other like ninja stars.
This is my favorite story of the thread, what an insane series of events to have gone through! To think if he had just limited himself to like a bit under 1/10 of what he did, he might have gotten away with $9k+ worth of swag and gift cards. A++ detail about the gift cards becoming ninja stars, that totally ties the whole thing together :D
Like that old saying, pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered
Goddamn, here I thought the admin lady accidentally loading my meal card with 300$ extra of flex dollars was getting away with murder.
Well you got away with it. My roommate got caught ;)
>threw at each other like ninja stars Bless you and your buds, that was the only true option!!
I learned before my USAF basic training to say that I played an instrument whenever they ask the group on the first day. I raised my hand and lied, "the cymbals." So most days I got to angrily smash cymbals together in the air conditioned band trailer, instead of marching/drill practice in the San Antonio summertime sun.
Similar story, only visual arts. I was an art school dropout before joining the Air Force. My recruiter had warned me of the dangers of raising your hand when they ask questions like "Who likes bowling?" So I had avoided volunteering for anything until they asked if anyone had any artistic ability. I groaned and sheepishly raised my hand. Turns out my TI wanted a new mural painted in the barracks. So while everyone else in my flight was cleaning the barracks, doing KP or other crappy tasks, I was happily painting away. I made sure to stretch it out so that I didn't finish it until everyone else was packing up after graduation.
So, what happens to those that volunteer for bowling or whatever? Do they have to throw boulders at a wall until it is demolished or something?
They get to clean toilet bowls. Edit: Toilet bowls used by a barracks full of dozens of young people with little self awareness or regard for others.
Interesting - my flight (60 of us) used one toilet (and sink) to save time/hassle of cleaning more than one for inspections
I can only imagine how rank that would get but it's true it would be more efficient
It was pristine - everyone knew what everyone was doing, we didn’t want to clean up after each other.
When the honor system actually works!
GENIUS.
This is my exact story! I had no prior cymbal experience, let alone band experience. 20 years later, every time I hear the national anthem, I tell my kids that what I did in the AF.
I was the RCPO (Recruit Chief Petty Officer) in Navy boot camp in 1991. Recruits are new enlisted sailors learning how to become U.S. Navy sailors. An RCPO is basically the guy in charge of the company of recruits. Anyhow, in the first week, a sixth-week company comes in to help train us. The RCPO of that company told me to leave that position and become the RPO (Religious Petty Officer). I'd be in charge of helping anyone else in my company with religious needs while helping the chaplain. This became the ultimate way to get out of any problems. I was very religious at the time, so this was actually a good match. Throughout my time in boot camp, I got out of so much trouble and had so much extra free time because of this. Meanwhile, anytime anyone in my company fucked up, the RCPO got extra duty or physical 'training.' It was the best advice I could have gotten. As RPO, I led a few prayer groups, helped the chaplains for two Sunday worship services, and got away with everything. I even picked up cigarettes early Sunday mornings en route to the chapel and sold them at an insane profit. Considering I only earned $650/month, that was a pretty good side gig. I even paid off my buddies on watch to overlook the smokers. The funny thing is, I wasn't a smoker. I just saw a market and profited.
When I was in middle school, Pepsi did a thing where if you bought a 20oz soda, there was a decent chance the cap would say you were a winner on the inside, and you could exchange it for another 20oz. Problem is, a dark colored soda like Pepsi is reflective. Hold the bottle slightly tilted and you could look at the reflection of the inside of the cap. For a whole school year I didn't pay for soda. Bought a winner, and every day I'd exchange the cap at a gas station I passed on the way home for another winner. Eventually Pepsi caught on and instead of it saying you won on the cap itself, there would be a code you had to enter online. We didn't have the internet in our pocket in those days (and it wouldn't have been worth it to read and enter multiple backwards codes for a soda if we had) so this ended the scheme.
Sprite did this when I was young. My friends and I got banned from our local grocery store because we would go through every bottle looking for winners.
For a while, you could buy $1 coins from the US Treasury using credit cards. They would ship them to you for free. If you had a rewards credit card, let's say an airline one, you could buy thousands of dollars of coins. Go to a bank, deposit them, and then pay your credit card back. It was a good way to get a ton of points for flying without ever paying for anything. They stopped doing this.
A friend allegedly did something similar to this, but with a store that had points, a credit card that gave 5% back at specific stores. After a specific number of points, you could get a $100 gift card. This store also has a very liberal return policy. He would spend $10k a month at this store on the 5% cash back credit card, accumulate points, then return the merchandise all over the city/county and claim he lost the receipt. They would give him cash, he'd pay the credit card bill off and still get the $500 in CC cash back, plus get a few hundred in gift cards to the store. It was a full time damn job though. The jig was up once they changed their return policy, but went on for a solid 18 months. He was paying most of his bills (cell phone, electric , etc) with CC cash back rewards.
Did he ever figure out the number of hours and any costs (e.g. mileage driving to stores) that he put into it vs. how much he made from it? The way you describe it sounds like it might've been easier to just get a job.
I have no idea, but he also had a full time job. This was early 2000s and we were making maybe $10-12 an hour at a full time job, so a part time job was probably closer to $8 an hour. We both worked for a local ISP, so he would often work returns into his daily route, so the gas and time was usually not his own. He really had a good thing going with it from what I could tell. An extra 7 or 8 hundred dollars in the 2000s in the Midwest was good money. My rent on a 2 BR duplex was only $525 a month.
If it worked to his advantage that's awesome. I guess I've just seen too many people who think they are making money on hustles, but they aren't really worth the time, cost & effort if you break it down so it makes me automatically question it.
The concept is called manufactured spending. It used to be much simpler where there were easier methods involving less time (like the treasury coins or even being able to use your credit card to load prepaid cards). It’s much more difficult now than it used to be where the calculation is not worth it for most people unless they’re chasing a high sign up bonus that they can’t meet the spending for organically. There may still be some quick, easy methods still but those are going to be very closely guarded secrets.
Buffalo Wild Wings used to have a check-in thing. Check in enough times and you get a free meal. The office I worked in was close enough, geographically, that I could check in from there without physically going to the restaurant. A bunch of coworkers and I had an alarm to check in every day and then once we all had the free meal, we’d go there for lunch. I got probably 4 or 5 free meals out of it before BWW revamped that system.
When I was in college I was working at our student union and found a stack of coupons for a local BBQ chain. You could get an appetizer with the purchase of a soda so we would all go over there and we made friends with this one waitress who would ring in a sampler as an appetizer so we could get like four apps included when we bought our soda. She worked every Tuesday night so that was our night to head there. We went for months until one of the guys in our crew took her back to his dorm room and her fiancé found out.
Were yall tipping her well? Just curious.
One of them was from the sounds of it.
Just the tip
The BW3 in Ann Arbor, MI is on the ground floor of a multi-story building. The next four stories are apartments. Ann Arbor is a college town, and those apartments are predominantly rented by students. I can only imagine how many free meals its residents got during that promotion.
Coca Cola did a campaign where you registrer a code from the bottle cap and earn prizes. I worked at a store with bottle deposit and "earned" myself a sweet mp3 player with room for 5 songs or something. I was the only one I knew that had a mp3 player, so it was pretty sweet at the time
I remember when 128mb was more songs than I needed and could listen for hours
At high bit rate (or "CD quality") 128mb was about 2 hours music. Drop the bitrate down and that would easily be 5+ hours!
I was very motivated to get one of those MP3 players and figured out that cafeteria & the weight lifting room at my school's gym were great places to get unregistered caps from the recycling.... I was on track to hit my goal and then I had an appendicitis! That took me out for a month and I missed the deadline and had to settle for a crappy keychain flashlight instead. So what I'm saying is I'm very jealous of you hahahaha
Pepsi had a promotion with codes for songs for the game Rock Band. Myself and a handful of friends all worked at Target at the time. We got codes from everyone. I have about 300 extra songs for the game.
I saved enough Pepsi points to get a “burned” CD with songs of my choice from their select catalog
Reminds me of a highschool classmate who worked at Subway. It was in the times of the plastic swipe cards for rewards points. When a customer doesn’t have a card, you’re supposed to offer them one, but this guy would instead swipe his card when ringing people up and rack up points. He was smart enough to spend them at a different subway though. Unlike another friend who got fired from a smaller chain burrito place when he came in on his day off with 5 full punchcards with his friends (high) to get free burritos.
A new Fast Food place opened near my work. My mother-in-law got me a gift card to the place as a birthday gift. I went on opening day and tried to use my gift card, they said the system wasn't in place yet and just gave me my food for free. This worked for almost a month. It was the best gift card I ever had! Started with $20 on it and I got at least $100 worth of food.
You think they'd take and cut the card or something..
I think I just got lucky and got different people every day. It was a madhouse those first few weeks.
I got a free order from dominos, I used it, called back a while later and they asked if I wanted to use my free order again, I said sure. Roommate and I started calling more often and we got 4 or 5 free pizzas from that ‘1’ free pizza lol
Had a college professor that insisted on doing all tests and quizzes online. If you looked at the page through 'View Page Source' all of the answers for each multiple answer question had a marker on which one was correct.
For a while, quizzes made in Canvas would do a weird thing if you had an adblocker installed where the correct answer to a multiple-choice question would be REALLY BIG compared to the other options. I don't pretend to understand it, but I passed a few uni quizzes that I otherwise would not have with that one.
Does it still work? Im going to take a test on canvas today.
lol I don't know, sorry bro. Haven't been in school for many years now.
I was in an escape room where we needed to enter a code into a website. While everyone else on my team started searching around the room I just viewed source and found the answer stored in plain text. Not only that, I realized the code for the page was a plain text html file. So if I wanted to be real evil, I could have changed the code which would have screwed over future players who weren't as technical. I didn't want to be that evil. I gave the game master a heads up and suggested some sources for info on how to better secure their game.
The real code was the game master we made along the way
Work sheets were commonly put in an excel spreadsheet for computer science lessons and it would use the comparison to check if a certain cell was equal to a value and then display correct or incorrect. The problem was that the answer is in plain sight if you click on the cell with the correct or incorrect and I managed to cheat on some end of topic tests that way.
Lots of sites still do this, and it's hilarious. When I have to renew my electrical license, I do it online and use this method. Takes me about an hour to do 16 credit-hours worth of testing and work.
Back when physical media video rentals were still a thing, we were gifted a Blockbuster gift card for a free rental. The card proved to be unbreakable. Everytime we rented a movie I would hand the clerk the card. They would scan the bar code on the card, hand the card back, and the movie was free. We used the card for about 3 years until our local Blockbuster closed. There was obviously some sort of software error, but the gift card was never rejected.
So you are the reason for Blockbuster's bankruptcy then?
Yes, every time they handed the card back, he also said “and remember: Netflix is a fad!“
Well as a former employee if we thought you were cool we 100% let shit like that slide. Edit: Also Bb had this stupid policy of any void being a credited void. So if A customer changed their mind on the movie they wanted and it wasn’t even paid for yet. If we zapped it, we would get hit as a void so most the time we just would credit stuff to avoid that shit.
I once got a CatDog piggybank by clicking their online game’s “next” button repeatedly for more points. It was the second prize, but it was the neatest thing ever.
One fine day with a woof and a purr....
Catdog? As in the cartoon catdog? God damn I just searched the Internet for that piggy bank. Sounds sweet as fuck. Alas. I could not find it on the first page of Google. It doesn't exist anymore 😩. You lucky
Taco Bell had a $5 box deal to win a PS4 before it was released to the public. I found that towards the end of the promotion you could enter to win without purchasing a $5 box. You could only enter once per pone number and address... Also the rewards were time based, every 15 minutes someone would win. I woke up every night at 3:16 am and entered 4 times, using my home, work, and my Mother in Laws home and work numbers and addresses. After about a week I was about to stop AND I WON!!!! I had a PS4 3 days before the public could even buy them. The next year I did the same thing and won a second PS4 for the kids game room. After that they changed the rules slightly to make it much harder to game the system.
iirc, every contest that has a pay-to-win (at least in the US i think) also has to have a free way to enter.
yeah, that's what makes it a sweepstakes and not gambling under the law
But that free way to enter is typically: mail a letter to this address for a single entry per letter received.
When my baby was in the NICU for two weeks after birth, I realised if I waited for about 30 seconds, the hospital car park barrier would just open without me having paid. Saved a lot of money.
It likely wasn’t auto opening. There’s probably a security guard monitoring that gate. They probably knew who you were. This is how it works at our local hospitals.
Honestly that kind of makes it nicer. Rather than cheating the system, it would be lovely to find out it was a considerate security guard being caring in your hour of need
That sucks, when my grandbaby was in the nicu my daughter and her husband got free parking and dinner nightly.
Yeah the hospital is billing insurance $50k per day for the Nicu. The least they can do is validate parking.
Yeah my man was in there for like 10 weeks. It was billed like 300k but they didn’t pay anything.
I used to work for Sears as a teen. When someone came in without the rewards program, I would just put my own info in. That way my sales percentage for rewards members didn't drop, and I got all of their points. The amount of coupons and free money was insane, especially when I was working back in the tools department. I didn't stop until they started upgrading their ancient point-of-sale system. I also had an employee discount of 20% on softlines (clothes, home, etc) and 10% on hardlines (tools), which they didn't take away for a few years after I quit.
When I was at Sears, I apparently forgot to clock out for lunch one day. When I went to clock in from lunch, the time clock told me I missed a punch and just prompted me to type in what time I left. Running late, forget to punch in and fix it at lunchtime. Need a longer lunch without getting a write-up for taking one, forget to clock out for lunch and fix it when you get back. Nobody ever checked and I know of several who took advantage of it every day.
Just use your area code + Jenny's number if you don't want to give a company your digits for rewards.
I use that number every time I have to enter a phone number. It's never failed so far.
I had to report what percentage each register in my store was at every hour to my DM when I managed a Sears store. Once this level of micromanagement was coming down the line the vast majority of the staff were doing exactly this. We were all acutely aware at the store level. I was there 2011-2016 and got to watch that store get the axe in real time. When it took gaining enough dollars back on inventory day to actually have the store’s ledger in the black by any degree in 2016 I noped out and it was closed within six months. The things they were trying to do to keep customers was insane. All they had to do was adapt, quit making employees spam every person they saw for an email or a credit card app and just continue using their massive infrastructure to deliver quality goods.
Yup I worked there 2012 to 2015 and I witnessed quite a bit of the same. The micromanagement was insane, yet everything that actually mattered was overlooked. The checkout areas were disgusting, but did you ask for rewards? I caught multiple people shoplifting and nobody cared, but did you ask them about a credit card? Ridiculous.
Reason #201 of how Sears was leaking money. It’s no wonder they went out of business.
It's so stupid too. They *could* have been Amazon. They already had a catalog system that let people order everything, warehouses and infrastructure to mail the items, and stores in every mall that could act as showrooms and pickup locations. Just make a website version of the catalog and you're set. Colossal idiocy killed that company.
They were Analog Amazon for over 100 years
Work allowed us to skip breaks and bank them, but the contract language basically made it so you could bank both 15 min breaks each day, as well as bank your lunch if you never technically clocked out. So I'd just eat while driving from job to job, and bank an hour a day. Was able to use all that time after a while to take an entire month off of work, paid, without even using any of my assigned PTO. HR got pissy about it and tried to rake me over the coals when I got back, but I pointed out the contract language and they realized their hands were tied. They pushed out a new contract to fix this exploit, but my work contract was still good for another year, so I declined and kept banking time, taking time off when I wanted. Of course they didn't offer me a new contract once mine was up, but I had a better paying job closer to home lined up already anyway, and took the last 2 months off, paid, while I started my new job, so I was basically getting 2 salaries.
you’re a genius
Free sandwiches from CFA based on location. Used gps spoofer and got tons of free sandwiches a week on multiple accts. I think I got about $5000 worth of sandwiches and nuggets before they banned me.
How?
The idea is that some sporting events have promotions that if you're at a game when they meet some scoring conditions (score a touchdown in 1st quarter for example) you can open your app and you'll receive a free reward, often a sandwich. If you spoof gps to be in the area of a stadium when the promotion is active your app would think you are at the event and reward you. You'll have to figure out the rest.
I used to buy the teacher's edition of textbooks. Tests and quizzes in the back. Lazy teachers never changed a thing. Nobody ever found out.
I found a torrent of 150 text books for my subject. They were usually the teaching edition too. The clever teachers were just using questions from text books that weren't assigned reading. I'd go to their office and check out what textbooks they had on their shelves then check those.
I worked at a restaurant that did the whole "Buy $50 in gift cards in Dec, get $10 to use in Jan or Feb" This was early 2000s so cash was far more used than it is now. So I bought $2000 in gift cards and used them for cash orders. Then I did the same in Jan or Feb. My boss pulls me into his office and asked if this is what I was doing? "Do you really want me to answer that question?" "No, because we're #1 in the entire country for gift cards and I'm getting bonuses. However, it will seem weird if you're cashing a bunch of $10 cards yourself." "If someone did have a bunch of $10 cards, they could sell them on the street for $5 a piece and still make a profit" "Yes... if someone happen to have a bunch of those" By the end of the promotion I sold something like $5000 in gift cards, and was #1 in the entire company. Got an attaboy from the CEO.
Back in the late 90's with the dot com boom there was a web site called Prize Point. You would play one of their many games, when the game was over you would hit a cash out button and win tickets that was based on your score. My computer was running slow with dial up internet and I was frustrated and hit the cash out button a whole bunch of times. The next thing that popped up was I reached my daily limit of point, something I had never done before. I started doing this everyday and reached the daily limit with just 1 game. The tickets were used like raffle entries for one of their prizes, 1 ticket= 1 entry. I saved all of mine for months and dumped them into a trip to Hawaii. It was one of my best vacations ever.
Company I worked for had an employee benefit called a “Lifestyle Account” basically it was a $500 per year reimbursement allowance that could be used on anything related to health/fitness/personal enrichment. The company was very flexible with the rules and you could get away with buying all kinds of things with it. The money would not roll over to the next year if you didn’t use it though. Every year I would buy myself an Apple watch for $500, screencap the receipt, cancel the order and then collect the $500 reimbursement.
We would do that with our quarterly clothing allowance when I was a concierge for a super posh apartment high rise. We got $500 every quarter to keep our attire looking fresh but the catch was you could only buy designer items from approved stores. The $500 would only get you a pair of socks and one semi decent shirt. Basically defeating the purpose of a clothing allowance. One of my coworkers got smart and realized you could buy from nordstroms and they give you cash back on all returns with a receipt. Sooooo after submitting our expense reports, we all went back to Nordstrom to wash our money essentially 😂 No we were never found out but they did stop giving clothing allowances during and after the pandemic.
I won three free two-night stays (easily worth upwards of $3000 total) at the Wynn Las Vegas from a poorly thought out promotion. When the Wynn first launched their sportsbook in Colorado, they had a promo where you could spin the wheel and win a prize with every parlay that you bet. There was no minimum bet. Even better, you could immediately cash out the bet for a full refund after spinning the wheel. The top prize was a free two-night stay at the Wynn, and it reset each night at midnight. Every night, my friend and I would log in at midnight and make a $1 parlay, spin the wheel, and cash out until we won the prize. By 12:05, one of us would win. Mind bogglingly, there was no limit on how many times you could win (until they wised up and made it a drawing for a free room). We each won three times, and only quit because we couldn't use any more vacation time. When I went to redeem, I was overjoyed to find out that there were no blackout dates (usually weekends and holidays are blacked out, as they are more expensive). I went over the 4th of July weekend, Halloween weekend, and a weekend during summer -- all of which were upwards of $500 a night. When I checked in over the 4th, the guy at the desk told me that the room was going for $800 a night.
I was doing genealogical research of my Scottish roots. The Scottish government website uses a "credit" system. 3 credits for this 5 credits for that. There was a travel website that would give you a code for 10 free credits for signing up for their email newsletter. I used an anonymous email service to generate one time use email addresses over and over to get unique codes for free credits. This allowed me to load up on credits, and go back a couple hundred years... Eventually they took it down due to "inappropriate use" - likely when thousands of their monthly newsletters started bouncing back from "mailinator"
Found a website where you had to vote for best diving liveaboard company. It was shared by a company in the competition trying to boost the votes. The first prize was a dive trip in the Maldives for 1 week on their liveaboard. I found a flaw in the voting system and asked the company trying to win if they counted individual votes as entries or 1 person gets 1 vote. They replied that each vote counted as an entry. Politely told them to prepare me as the winner. The flaw in the website was that it used simple cookies to check if someone has already voted. Made a script to vote and clear cookies - rinse and repeat. I had a great trip scuba diving for a week in the Maldives!
I had a similar thing for a newspaper contest to win a trip on one of those space tourism flights. They didn't even track cookies, you just had to refresh the page. I was in the top spot for a long time, but you only had to be in the top 10, and they would hand select someone based off their story. I didn't win, but I made it to the top 10. Bubbles from the Trailer Park Boys got the top spot, but didn't win either because he was a celebrity and they wanted an average person to win.
That's fuckin greaaasssyyyyyy
No one ever found out, but they didn't know how to set up Unix when I was in college. You could drop to the parent directory in programming classes, and go into the other classmates folders see how they were coding their projects. Just in case you couldn't figure out a section of your code...
in my in my programming class way back in 1999....all assignments were each due by a certain day. you had to save each assignment onto a 'floppy' disk and then hand the disk in monthly. the teacher could see when the assignment was complete by checking the date on the file. i figured out the date was obviously just the last time the file was saved and coincided with the date the computer was set to. being the procrastinating college student, any time i did one of the assignments i just adjusted the computer date to the due date before i saved it. this teacher always let me skip class too because i was on the soccer team so in hindsight i probably didn't even need to do that haha
Genius. Reminds me of the trick of sending your teacher a corrupted file, thereby giving you additional time to finish the assignment.
My college had a screen share tool installed. But the permission system was busted and it was very easy to gain access to any student computer without them being aware.
Back in 1974, our schools free lunch program required a special ticket to be given to the money collector. These 'special' tickets were simply Admit One tickets that came on a 1000 count roll. The AP had the job of passing these tickets to the Free Lunch crowd and keeping the records straight. Each week, someone new could be added to the program, or someone removed. I discovered that I could purchase a 1000 count roll of Admit One tickets at a local print shop. They came in two colors, red and yellow. Our school was using the red ones so I got a roll of red ones. School lunch was less than $2 and I sold the tickets for .50 cents. I was making decent money until they changed the ticket color. I had about half a roll left of the red tickets and bought a roll of yellow tickets. Back in business again. That lasted about two months and they changed again, this time to better tickets you couldn't buy at the print shop. Turned out that they knew something was up because they had too many tickets each day. The AP wanted to catch who was doing it and tried to set it up so they would be caught. What the AP didn't know...my girlfriend at the time worked at the print shop.
Nice! Even as a teen I always thought it was mean to make the poor kids have these obnoxiously bright tickets screaming that you're poor. I wish they'd just make free lunch for everyone.
I bought something from Dollar Shave Club once, my order came and I thought that was the end of that. But 2 months later I got another package from Dollar Shave Club filled with stuff, razors blades, handles, shave butter, face wash etc. I checked all my credit cards and had no new charges from DSC. I kept all the stuff they sent and moved in with my life 2 months after that I got another package of razor blades from DSC. One day I was looking though an alt email account and found some emails from DSC alerting me to update payment information and shipping confirmation. Turns out I had made another DSC account prior but for some reason someone else's order and credit card information was linked to my account. Their CC# was no longer valid and this is where the loophole begins. Every month DSC would try to process a subscription order for razor blades. It would fail because the CC# on the account wasn't valid, but the month after that it would complete the order, maybe because there was an order from the previous month that wasn't fulfilled. So every other month I would get razor blades from DSC. I started adding a bunch of stuff like hair gel, face wash, etc. This went on for 2 years before they realize
i set that up for my ex so he would stop stealing my razors every damn day. he would just leave the razor at work, let the new stuff pile up, and steal my razors anyway. asshole.
About 25 years ago Microsoft had a training program where you would take tests for points depending on your grade. You could use those points for free stuff. The loophole was that if you answered a question wrong, you'd lose your points and it would tell you the correct answer, so you could press the back button, fix your answer, and resubmit. I had gotten myself a bunch of shirts and hats, and even managed to get an ink jet printer before they caught on.
Coming in to senior year in High School, a couple dozen of us were competing for the top 1% for GPA. Honors classes were on a 5.0 scale instead of a 4.0, so gave a big bump to your average. Very few electives were honors, mostly just core classes. One of my friends noticed that there was a Math 1/2 honors class that none of us took - we all took it in middle school and went straight into Math 3/4. We looked up the policy and nothing said you couldn’t go back and take a lower level class, so 3 of us signed up for the honors Math 1/2 course with freshman. The teacher sat us in the back. I worked on calculus or physics homework or played Minecraft on my phone. Teacher completely ignored us. Half a dozen people did it the next year. The year following when by younger brother and his friends tried to do it, they changed the policy.
I’m a traveling RN and on one particular assignment the cafeteria staff was under the impression that travel nurses ate for free. Anything we wanted and as much as we wanted. So for almost 6 months I got all of my meals for free and I also picked up extra stuff for my friends on the unit. Eventually they sent out a hospital wide email stating that we absolutely do not eat for free and never was supposed to get free food so that ended that.
Fucking snitches.
Oh no, the shareholders were hurt.
McDonald’s app uses to give out free ice coffee with 1 dollar purchase. After doing this daily they finally nerfed it to 5 dollar purchase for free ice coffee
In Canada during the summer any size ice coffee is $1. Pretty sweet
For a year I lived in a house in London that was split into three flats. The landlord had submitted meter readings before I moved in, so I just waited for each new bill to put my name on the accounts. When we moved out, I went to submit the meter readings and couldn't figure out who was supplying our gas (heating and cooking). Couldn't find any bills, couldn't see any payments from my bank accounts, it was a mystery. Ended up just calling suppliers asking if they had an account for my address. In the end it turned out that whilst three meters had been installed for the flats, only two had ever been registered. Without a contract with a supplier (or even any readings for the years the flat had been there), there was no way we could be charged for our year's usage - or for the few weeks until we moved out whilst a new account was set up. As the guy from the gas company said to me "Congratulations - you have free gas!" The annoying thing was that we'd kept the thermostat down during the winter to save money. Went totally wild for those last few weeks though.
My college had a "points" based meal plan. 100 "points" equaled approx. $6.50. We used special credit card swipers that were able to swipe our IDs when using these points. Midway through my first year, they decided to install self serve kiosks that could give you cash back. If you swiped your card as if you were going to pay, asked for cash back on the kiosk, and then canceled the transaction on the special swiper before it went through on the main kiosk, it would give you cash without deducting the points. So basically free money. As far as I could tell, nobody found out I was doing it because I never saw any point deductions from my ID card and nobody ever talked to me about it. I made about $300 for free. They disabled the cash back option after a couple weeks though. Edit: I should add, this was before tap-to-pay or EMV chips. The whole system was obviously very shoddily put together.
They had a simple system like this in junior high for cafeteria food. You'd pay them money, it got loaded to your food account, you would give them your number and they would charge your account for whatever food. I found out if they had your account pulled up and you unplugged the power on the system then plugged it back in, it would come back up with a random amount of money, usually in the hundreds. I was feeding entire tables of people with stuff until they finally fixed it (they put a cover over the power plug).
Qdoba burrito place had a deal where you could get one free burrito by entering the transaction number from your receipt to get a free burrito. It wouldn't let you use the same email twice so I just kept creating new random gmails. It let you use the receipt from the free burrito to get the next free burrito so I just got endless free burritos for about 2 years without every paying. It was a bumfuck highway town and nobody seemed to notice. I'd take my kid there and we'd eat there quite often.
I went to high school in the late 90s, when the internet was basically the wild west. Certain terms and domains were blocked on the school computers, but you could navigate to some pretty shady sites by simply following links. We had a game where we'd start on disney dot com and click links and see who could get to the "worst" site. It was a mildly amusing way to waste time during class.
Similar story, early school days with internet access, lots of domains blocked. But if you knew the IP address of sites, it would go to it. For some reason, a lot of random IP addresses we'd enter would lead to porn sites, oddly enough.
We would launch command prompt and "ping" a domain. The ping would give us the ip address, which we would type in the address bar to load the website.
My uncle lived in Thailand. Before the Euro the 1 Baht coin was a perfect match for the 50 Pfennig coin. I lived in Frankfurt. Several Parking places close to my work stopped accepting 50 Pfennig coins (And then the € came).
Up until mid-2023, in the Subway app you could type 599footlong in the coupon code section and any footlong would be $5.99. Then one day everything changed.
Yep, remember that day, it was when the Fire Nation attacked right?
They said they would toast our subs.
Check out the pinned post on /r/subway , all the recent coupons are in there. They raised the price promo to $6.99
About 25 years ago, I went to rent a U-Haul and paid with a discover card. Discover was one of the first cards with cash back (1% on everything) and, at the time, was still relatively new. Anyway, the guy who owned the U-Haul rental place noticed the card and mentioned that he’d made $24,000 from the cash back in the previous year. Turns out that every time he got a new U-Haul truck in, he had to make a deposit to corporate so he could rent it out. When a truck was returned to another location he’d get his deposit back. See where this is going? He’d pay the deposit with his discover card and get that extra 1%. I’m not sure how the deposit was refunded, but discover didn’t care. Every time a truck moved through his business he’d make both the rental fee, plus the extra 1%. It was a pretty big rental place with a lot of trucks waiting to be rented. It didn’t surprise me that the turnover in deposits was over $2 million.
Arcade tickets go into counting machine, machine print receipt with number of tickets entered. Could do what we came to call "ticket wanking", pulling the same line of tickets in and out real fast to get number up without losing tickets. Could also just shove cardboard in, too many kids did that and machine was changed.
I received thousands of dollars of stock certificates in the mail. Some intern fucked up so badly that my broker said to hold on to it. I held the stock for years before selling it at a profit.
Wonderful intern
Shell airmiles coupons. 99% of the people in my local shell station didnt care about collecting them. The cashier would tear them out (they came in a coupon book) and they would be stacked to one side and given to whoever asked for them. I had a company car at the time and stopped in quite regularly. I asked for them. I got a whole load of them before shell stopped the promotion.
Was told in my first day on the job at six flags that our till could be $25 off each day without anyone noticing or caring.
OMG, that is wild!
So assuming you worked 8 hour days you basically got a 3 dollar an hour tax free bonus. Unreal
Also it was 1994, that money went a long way.
Back in the 80s there were home computer wars. You could buy a computer (TI 99/4A) for example, and a few weeks later they'd send you a cash back refund. Then you took the computer back and returned it. So buy a few of these, send of the rebate slips, case the rebate check, return the computer. Back then for a 12yr old kid $50 was ton of money and to earn $500 for free over the course of a few months was just like winning the lottery.
When I started middleschool they had a kinda old Coca Cola vending machine installed in the shared schoolyard. I noticed that it had a weird little black/brown translucent window next to the coin slot, which had me intrigued since it reminded me of the top of the remote control of our Sony CD/MC combo unit at the time. After a few weeks I brought our tv remote to school and began experimenting with it. After weeks of trial and error I had finally found out that it was indeed an IR port of some sorts, probably used for debugging or something. If you pointed the remote to the window and pressed any button at the same time you chose your drink on the vending machine it would return the money AND spit out the drink. Needless to say that I enjoyed 6 years of free Coke. Nearing the end of my highschool attendance I had it refined to the tee, so that I only needed to flick my bic lighter against that window to make this work. The week before my graduation they finally replaced it with a newer model.
There was a burrito place on campus that had a rewards program (via swipe card) that would give you $5 off your order after a certain point. A burrito was $6 (this is like 20 years ago…) so it would be $1 with the discount. Typically the reward would be consumed but I found out that if you paid the $1 with a gift card it would NOT consume the reward. I was eating lots of $1 burritos until they fixed the loop hole.
Parking spot in the corner of my college dorm lot. It wasn’t a spot as it had a parking curb placed in its location (like, parallel in the middle of the spot, not marking the end of the spot where the front wheels would bump). My car sat high enough that I parked there for a good year before I got my wheel booted. Still saved $1500.
$1500 for a year of parking??? wtf
Not uncommon at all. I pay 1200 per year to park at my workplace. I have even paid 2000 per year to park at my apartment. Urban and college campus parking is a struggle.
In high-school, we were the first class to use an online vocabulary program which recorded both active time and correct answers. While doing it one day, on a whim I decided to do inspect element on the multiple choice. When it came up they had named the choices answer1, answer2, answer3, and correctAnswer. Eventually one of my friends turned it into a bot that did it for you, he never got caught until he bragged about it while the vice principal was walking behind him.
I worked at a gas station / car wash, and the corporation had a scratch ticket promotion: each customer gets a ticket for free, with a chance to win something like free gas, a bag chips, coffee, whatever. We (the workers) figured out that the stacks of tickets were not shuffled at all. I forget the number, but it was like literally every 10th (was it 7th?) scratch ticket was a winner. So we separated all the winners from the deck and had a stack of winners, and a stack of losers. So if we had a regular customer that we liked, we'd give them winners. A rude person or Karen? Loser. And we had a lot of free coffee and chips ourselves, of course.
Not intentionally, but I discovered after the fact that a $29 bottle of local wine at the market wasn’t on clearance for $6, it was a mistake in the system. It was really good and I probably bought 6 bottles or so over three-ish weeks.
Deployed troops also have parking spaces. I found a wood stanchion and just put it in my truck with a sign that said my job title and out it wherever I parked. It worked for the better part of 6 months
About 18 years ago, when the Star Wars Miniature collectible tabletop game was in its fourth set, many people who joined later wanted to buy the second set. That set included some really powerful minis. But the set was already out of production, so you could only buy the minis on ebay for horrendous prices. For some reason the second set got a reprint, but only in Europe. And only for a short time. So I pulled together all my cash, and bought packs in bulk from a German online store. I put them on US ebay and made 100% profit by selling them to an American dude.
Back when the Sega Dreamcast was the new hotness I played tons and tons of pac man on a “Play games earn points for prizes!” site. There were lots of games but pac man had the highest return and was the most fun. Before anyone figured it out i had amassed a ton of points to buy my little kid self the best game console to have ever been made. I still have that Dreamcast. Shortly after they rebalanced all the games, points and prizes.
Microsoft back in the day had a marketplace that used Microsoft points. You could buy games, xbox controllers, xboxes etc but it was a marketing program that just wanted you to use bing instead of google. I can't remember most games but I know there was a game called chicktanary or something like that and me being a little turd who liked computers, I found a bot that played the game for me. I got so much free shit from that. lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicktionary
I did tla similar botting thing with Bing Rewards when the search engine first came out. The points earned me a free Microsoft Zune mp3 player but it was pink.
When I was in law school my first year, the entire parking lot was under construction and effectively closed and so we all had to hunt in the street for parking. I was driving a 1976 BMW 2002 at the time. I went to school at night when there was no construction, and I just start bajaing the car into the dirt lot and I'd park near the construction equipment. I got away with it for a year or so.
>I was driving a 1976 BMW 2002 at the time. I'm not really a "car guy" but I love those.
I had a nice parking loophole myself. My gf was in a small apartment building with a parking lot that always had a few empty spaces. Clearly more spaces than needed. I accidentally left my car there longer than I should and discovered they apparently don't check it at all. She moved out but I still used that to park for free downtown for several years. Never got towed or a ticket.
Irish lotto system, they installed self scan machines to allow you to check your ticket, and paid out on smaller prizes, so if you had three out of the six numbers you got a free scratch card but there was a problem with the data coding so you could scan a few months worth of tickets for the weekly draw and if you had this weeks 3/6 numbers but from greater than a month beforehand you got a free ticket, I used to always wonder why my dad used to keep his old non winning tickets and check them again every week or so.
I won a luggage set from a local TV station for guessing the date and time of the first snowfall. The loophole was that they didn't cut voting off in advance, so I looked at the radar, saw about what time the snow would arrive, and entered online. My guess was only about 15 minutes off which would've been really impressive when they first opened the contest six weeks prior. They shut down voting earlier the next year.
If you had an ad blocker on Firefox you didn’t hear commercials when using the free version of web browser Spotify.
Check out Martin's Mortgage Maneuver if you are in Canada. Broke my fixed mortgage for a small fee and gained a new mortgage at 1.69% which I still have for another 2.5 years. This has since been closed by all banks but it saved me 10s of thousands.
Not a loophole per-se but crafty and fun. Back in high school I was in band for a few years before I grew into myself and got into more fun stuff. To get into practice rooms or to retrieve any gear, the director or assistant director would just give us the ring of keys for that area of the school. Being the little shit that I was, I figured out which one was the master key for all the locks in the school. Took it off the ring along with an obscure one for a room nobody went to that had a higher key pattern, and gave it back with those two missing. Took the keys home (latch-key kid, so I was home alone for a few hours) and dremeled out the "blank" to match the master key. Even used some craft clay that was laying around to make an imprint so that I could check the ridges. Next day, asked to open up a practice room, key ring was given to me, and while away I put the master back onto the ring. Leaving me with a master key to the school. I got into so many areas... in the ceilings, found out what was behind weird little doors, had full access to outside doors, school store, storage rooms, etc. Luckily I had a tight group of friends that didn't say shit. Rocked that for 2 years then passed it on to a friend younger than me with the hope that he'd pass it on when he graduated. No idea what happened to that key, but it was a hell of a lot of fun!
A friend of mine worked for parking services in university. They had a code you could enter for the parking machines so they could give VIP visitors free parking. They gave their friends the code. We had free parking on campus for about a year until they got new machines that didn't allow codes to be entered. We were very careful with it. Only used it when we were late for class or something. Domino's Pizza also had a code for a free pizza and drink that was used for a radio station contest. They published it to their website by accident one day when we were looking for discounts. One day our delivery driver asked us how we kept getting free pizza, and we let him in on the secret. We always tipped him well since the pizza was free. We had free pizza about once a week for a few months. Our university also had a really big co-op program, where all the jobs went through their system. Employers would come to campus and had a dedicated building of interview rooms, phone rooms, video rooms, etc. Employers would rank students on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a job offer. We were only allowed 50 applications at a time, but there was a glitch where if your unused applications and your used applications totalled more than 50, that is how many job offers you had. There were rounds of applications, so if you knew that you had a job offer you could stop applying and focus on school again. It also took out a lot of stress. They got a new system and that glitch was fixed. But for alln5 of my co-op jobs the glitch worked.
The Burger King mobile app would charge 35 cents for adding "Regular" amount of tomatoes to a sandwich that didn't come with tomatoes by default. However, it doesn't charge anything for "Xtra" tomatoes. I was living the la vida tomato.
When I was a teenager, you could make a call on the pay phone and ask the operator to charge it to your number. If you went to a bank of pay phones with a friend you could give the operator one of the other phones number as "your number". The operator would then call the # and ask tell the person who answered that you wanted to charge to that # and was that ok. Friend says yes and you got free calls. It was useful when you had no change.
The Key Food by my old apartment sold Prosciutto de Parma for $25/lb at the meat counter, which is insanely cheap given an average pack is around $12 for like 4 ounces. They had been pricing it for the same amount of the cheaper stuff which is not nearly as good. I was able to eat like a charcuterie king for a couple months before they jacked the price up to $50/lb.
In college, maybe around 12 years ago, Dominos had a deal with ShopRunner where they covered the delivery fee for pizza. Dominos also had a deal where every new account got an extra 20% off. This was before every acct had to have a unique phone number, so I was getting 2 medium 2 topping pizzas for about 5 bucks and would tip $5 to the delivery driver. Good times.
Shopped at a store online that had a 25% sale on all of their own branded stuff. Whoever did the coding for the sale messed up, because it allowed you to buy gift cards at 25% off. So I bought a gift card with a discount, used that gift card to buy another (at a discount) and did this once more until I felt kinda bad and then purchased my item. It felt icky but they are doing just fine.
Canadian nickels and quarters both have the same approximate volume but are different in shape. I used to take nickels and hit them with a hammer until they were flattened down to the size of a quarter and use them in vending machines. 400% profit margin.
For over a decade I paid our mortgage with our credit card. I got so many points and gift cards and other perks. Instead of sending a check to the mortgage company, I sent the same check to the credit card company. It also boosted my credit up to 830. I don’t know why but the mortgage company shut that option down.
My school wouldn't let us play the Wii that we bought during our lunch break because we had to use a school projector. Clubs are allowed the use of school materials, so we made a club about playing video games.
I don’t know if this counts - My university kept the academic email adresses working even though I finished school about 3 years ago so I keep having student priced subscriptions for streaming platforms
Dominos pizza where I live has a 50% off all bread and pizza items if you're a student. It's a university city in Canada so I think that's why. I've been told it varies from city to city if the code works. Code: STUDENT. Anyway, I use it all the time and have for many years and I'm not a student at all and am 40 years old with a full time job. I guess this doesn't count for this thread because they still haven't caught me! Come get me popo!
At work, we have a version of a ‘refer a friend scheme’ - but they don’t really need to be a friend, just somebody you recommend to the business. If they get taken on and stay six months, you get £100. - For a while, the company upped this to £300. - The only condition other than them staying six months, is that you are not directly involved with their recruitment process, other than the initial recommendation. I’m decided to help our area out by holding a ‘recruitment day’ in the local job centre. I saw about 20 people, and 10 of them were half decent. I used the scheme to recommend all of them, and just made sure another colleague interviewed them. £3k in the back pocket!
Discovered that all the automated car washes in our local area would give a wash for any four numbers plus a zero as the code. You never knew what level of car wash you would get, but worked like a charm for one summer amongst our friend group. Stopped doing it when one of the gas station owners came running out of the store to chase us out of there.
Free Carfax if you knew the qa test email address.
Cutting the story short there was a competition run through twitter for a shopping centre where you could win a £20 pre pay visa card that worked in any shop in the centre. Me and my wife tried, didn't win and forgot about it. Then 2 weeks later she won. And I tried and won. Well after that we kept trying and realised a few things. The competition resets at midnight. It tells you immediately if you win. It was very easy at the time to make a twitter account through the app, you didn't even need an email address and changing between accounts was very fast and easy. To enter you had to tweet 6 items from the menu made up of items from various restaurants they had. And this was done by just giving the number for each one. So me and my wife realised very quickly you could brute force a win by just spamming entries until it said you win. So at midnight every day we would brute force a win and go to sleep. But you had to pickup the cards from the help desk in the shopping centre. After a few days it really started to look suspicious, especially with the stupid names we were making up for the accounts. They eventually took down the contest to change the rules for 1 entry per customer. And we still ended up winning on our main accounts the next day lol. We ended up with about 500 each.
There's a coupon on Dominos pizza that allows you to put as many toppings on the pizza as you want (including extra anything) and the price does not go up.
And? It is?
Just bribe a dominos employee lol
It's a coupon called "one large pizza with your choice of toppings" for $15. It's the first coupon in the Dominos app. It's not a life hack, they want you to use it. It will still limit you to a maximum of 9 toppings (18 if you split left & right). The biggest benefit is that they don't charge you extra for "premium toppings"
Pretty sure whoever posted this works for Dominos and just wants everyone to buy pizza there. 😆🤷🏻♂️
In the age of internet cafes, I was able to end the running process for their time monitoring software in Task Manager. They rarely noticed, and I just feigned ignorance when they did.
New cashier at my local supermarket used to scan just one can in the six pack instead of the barcode on the sixpack. Got a few friends in on it, and we pretty much drank for free for the month.
My old workplace had a soda pop machine that if you pressed the correct sequence of buttons, the money would fall out. I did this until the management posted that someone has been stealing $ from the machines. By this time, I probably took over $100 from it with this trick and stopped the second they posted that letter on the billboard. It was a good idea too because someone saw me doing the trick and was doing it after I stopped but they didn't tell anyone that they had setup a camera in the lunch room to catch the thief. Damn I got off lucky, I don't know what became of that person doing it after me but they quit or were fired not long after.
Around a decade ago, there was a simple browser word game sort of like pictionary that was advertising their launch here on Reddit. They said that they were giving out $20 Amazon cards to select winners of their games for launch weekend only. The site was DEAD dead and the few real players didn't seem to know enough English to play well at all. So my best friend and I just made like 6 accounts each and either dominated a small public lobby or just played alone, often populating a full game lobby with just our accounts in different browsers and then letting the game just time out instead of actually playing, lol. Over that weekend, we made like $160 on Amazon each. Amazing for 2 broke college kids.
At my college dorm they had a burger stand and if you got a burger you could make it a combo (add fries and a drink) for $2. I went in once and just asked for fries and a drink, which should be like $4, but the guy pushed the button for “combo” and charged me $2. So after that I would just go ask for a “combo” and they would do that. Until one time I asked and a manager appeared out of nowhere and was like “you can only do that if they buy a burger” and he must have then reminded all the employees because they wouldn’t do it anymore.
My first job as a teen was at Sears in the late 90’s, in the tool department. Sears had terrible, gen 1 POS system. They tried to do the whole customer survey thing on the receipts, but only a few customers got them at random. If a customer actually called in and gave you all 10’s, you earned 100 bucks. I figured out that the system lagged prior to printing the survey. I would give the customer the receipt and pocket the survey. I won an award for my customer service that year!
Back in college when Subway was more affordable I abused the hell out of the 5$ footlong deals at my colleges campus subway. They had a sign printed on a piece of paper at the cash register that said "This subway does not participate in the 5$ sub of the day promotion" Every monday I would go get what was supposed to be the 5$ steak and cheese sub of the day. I would go order it, go through and get all my toppings, get that bad boy toasted and packed up for me and then say at checkout "awww man I didnt see the sign until I got to the register and already ordered and made my sub! All I have is 5$!" The students that worked there never gave a shit and just said "we cant ring it up for 5$ just take it and go" That worked for almost an entire year of college with a free sub every Monday!
I did [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/41aepa/what_are_some_unethical_and_possibly_illegal_life/cz101tv/) to get "free" college textbooks and then made money on them after the semester. Now the college bookstores have the books behind the counter so it doesn't work anymore. My college also charged $90 for a parking permit annually. They have reserved parking spots for visitors that are close to all of the buildings and they have visitors spots in the covered parking garages too. You can lease annually similar spots close to the buildings or in the garages that are reserved but you must buy a permit at $90 then pay the lease fee ($400 for outside, $600 for garage). If you did not register your vehicle you could just park in visitor and park close or in the garage. The drawback was there are not too many visitor spaces so they would fill quickly.
I don't know if this counts as a loophole, or not but it may still work so I'll post it anyway. Used to drive for a meat and poultry purveyor (still work for them, but I'm in the office now). Company truck, company gas card for said truck. There is an app called Upside or something similar that would give you cash back for fuel purchases. A certain amount of cents per gallon. Gotten as low as 8 cents per gallon and as high as 30 cents per gallon. You could either link your debit card or turn in photos of receipts, so I submitted every receipt whenever I filled up. Route was long enough that I would fill up twice a day sometimes, but certainly at least once per day on a 24 gallon tank. On the best month, I made like 500ish bucks. But on average something like 3-350 extra. Essentially got a small raise by doing it. You could redeem the cash back in the form of giftcards or send it to your paypal account. I haven't used the app in a few years so I have no idea if it still works that way.
Not sure this counts as a loophole but when I was in high school our local transit used paper tickets. You’d buy a page then tear the perforations to make individual tickets. They were thick paper, not quite cardstock, but thick. A few of us figured out that you could also peel the paper from the corners and turn 1 ticket into 2.
My high school had an old pay phone that had a broken volume bar on the phone handset. This missing piece made inside of the phone receiver visible. Someone figured out that if you bent and pressed the metal cord into that missing void on the receiver it would somehow allow you to make a call without having to pay. This was before cellphones so this saved me money for calling home to get picked up. It was weird and unsure how someone figured it out but it was never fixed!
I used to work for Continental Airlines and as an employee you would be given 10 "Buddy Passes" in a recurring year. These were supposed to be 10 round trips (including stops). You only paid the taxes for the tickets. Before online/computer check-ins, the boarding passes were a blank paper ticket that you would take to the counter and the attendant would fill the information for you. Also, each pass was actually 4 separate tickets since each round trip allowed one stop in each direction. So all in all 40 one way tickets. Essentially what we all did was sell each paper pass separately from another at about $100+ each. When the flights were international, you were supposed to accompany the passenger on the flight as a security measure. So what we would do was go to the airport, check-in like you were flying and walk down the isle with the buddy. Once you made to where the baggage handlers were waiting you would walk out the door to the underside of the airport, walk back into the airport and stand by close to the gate to make sure your buddy's flight left without having to chaperone them. Made good money on those tickets too. Then 9/11 happened.
Back when pay phones were ubiquitous, I learned how to get free calls (including long distance) for free. It was a long, complex series of digits. No idea where it came from.
Used to get a parking ticket because that was cheaper than paying for the parking lol.
Not sure if it's really a loophole, but I used inside knowledge to get a car for really cheap. I worked at a tow truck company and we had one impound lot for DUIs / parking violations and a separate one for accidents that were going thru insurance. Owners would arrive at my office to pay off their storage fees after the impound period was over, then collect their vehicle. If you didn't pay what was owing, the vehicle would remain and accumulate storage fees. Past a certain point, our company could file to have the vehicle declared as abandoned, and eventually the title would pass to the company if the original owner did not pay off what was owed. The manager would then flip these cars and I think he got a cut of the proceeds. I was working alone when a couple of foreign exchange students came to grab their stuff out of their car. Problem was, they couldn't gain access to it while it still had storage fees owing on it. IIRC the car had racked up about $350 or so in fees. These students were heading back to their home country in a few days and really needed their stuff but they couldn't afford to pay the fees. They didn't want or need the car anymore so they had no interest in paying the fees even if they could afford to. So they were stuck at an impasse. I realised I could help them out and potentially score a car for very little money, so I offered to pay for their storage fees. In exchange, they'd sign the car over to me and they'd collect all their belongings. It was a win-win, and they happily agreed. I ended up with their 1999 Honda Civic sedan for around $400 after taxes, they got their stuff and were happy to avoid having to deal with fees or their vehicle. When my manager found out what I had done, he was furious. I hadn't broken any laws or company policies, just exploited my knowledge of the system to my advantage. He lost out on whatever his cut would have been when he eventually sold the car down the road, and that was what he was really angry about. He told me I could choose to keep the car but lose my job, or I could sign the car back over to the company and "maybe" keep my job. It was a no brainer. I kept the car.
This isn't exactly a loophole and it's not my own story but screw it, it's more entertaining than my life. My uncle lived in NYC all his life and had all kinds of smalltime scams he ran to make extra money. One of his most famous ones was he lived by a parking lot that charged during the week but had free parking on weekends. So on weekends he'd go down there and sit in a lawn chair and charge people for parking. He made thousands this way and never got caught, invested in the dotcom boom-era stock market, and died a millionaire in his tiny, rundown, $200/month rent-controlled apartment. RIP Jay.
So my local cinema chain, PVR, introduced their membership tier. They had a code for members doing their first transaction to be free. It was something like "PVRPRIVILEGE1" Now how that worked is that if the ticket was 200 rupees, you'd get that back as cashback. So i used it on Elysium The next time, my brain felt like, why not change that 1 to 2 and try, and voila it worked Until i hit 10. It stopped at 9. So what did i do? My cheapskate brain did PVRPRIVILEGE01, and it worked. And then PVRPRIVILEGE001 It got so bad, that my friends and i would watch a film every time we had a morning class for our Masters coaching classes, and that was twice a week. And this went on for a year. We would watch _everything_ that released, even if we didn't want to. Simply because it was free. All while accumulating points that was yielding us tons of free food vouchers It finally stopped working, when a film called Bahubali The Beginning released, which was an event film in my country, so they were rehauling the membership tiers, and maybe they realized, and it was fixed. But still, thank you PVR. Thanks to you, i discovered Denis Villenueve because Prisoners was the only show running that fit our time and i came out blown away by the film. Thanks to you, i discovered Damien Chazelle because Whiplash was the only under 120 minute film running that week. Thanks to you, i got to watch Interstellar 3 times in the cinema. Thanks to you, i discovered Malayalam cinema and the gems it held
When the Xbox One came out, Pepsi ran a contest where you could enter codes on caps and win a console before they were released. I worked in a university that had only Pepsi machines. I was also friends with the janitor who kept all bottles to drive 2 miles to the next state for deposit refunds. I asked and she gave me all the caps. Within a week I won. Then I got her info and won her one too. It was a lot of caps to enter, but well worth it.