We’re all encouraged to be clever and use our critical thinkingskillsfrom a very young age. But sometimes, these skills come back to bitecompanieswhen they realize that they left gaping loopholes open that customers are happy to exploit…Redditors have recently beenrecallingthe most brilliant loopholes they’ve ever discovered, so we’ve gathered their best stories below. From hacks that savemoneyto clever tricks that result in freefood, enjoy reading about all of the ways people learnedhow toexploit the system. And feel free to take some inspiration from this post the next time you’re looking to save some cash. Just make sure to read the fine print first!This post may includeaffiliate links.
We’re all encouraged to be clever and use our critical thinkingskillsfrom a very young age. But sometimes, these skills come back to bitecompanieswhen they realize that they left gaping loopholes open that customers are happy to exploit…
Redditors have recently beenrecallingthe most brilliant loopholes they’ve ever discovered, so we’ve gathered their best stories below. From hacks that savemoneyto clever tricks that result in freefood, enjoy reading about all of the ways people learnedhow toexploit the system. And feel free to take some inspiration from this post the next time you’re looking to save some cash. Just make sure to read the fine print first!
This post may includeaffiliate links.
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My brother once yelled “last one to jump in the pool is gay,” and then jumped into the pool. However, I figured out that if I did not jump in then technically he would be the last one in the pool, and he is still gay to this day.
To find out more about how this conversation started, we got in touch with Reddit user_ZoroX_, who posed the question: “What’s the best loophole you’ve ever discovered?”
They were kind enough to have a chat withBored Pandaand share what inspired them to start this thread. “I was just thinking about interesting topics, and this was the first thing that came to my mind,” they noted.
Back in the 1960s, the school district in my hometown was broken up and absorbed into the surrounding districts. Fast forward to 2003. I’m applying to colleges. I discovered that there is a scholarship fund for people living in that old district’s area. The district is gone, but the scholarship still exists! I applied, and got the scholarship. I don’t think there were any other applicants.
I didn’t find this loophole myself but my friend did: A few years back, an online store had this promotion where whoever spent the most money over a month would get free round trip airplane tickets to anywhere in the world. My friend (who’s a f*****g genius) found that one thing you could buy on the site was a gift certificate. So he bought a $25 gift certificate and kept spending it on another $25 gift certificate. So he ended up spending $25 on round trip tickets to Australia.
We also asked the author if they think it’s right for people to be exploiting loopholes. “If it’s not straight up stealing, just exploiting a ‘bug’, then yes,” the OP says.Next, we asked ZoroX what they thought of the replies to their post. “There were pretty interesting ones, however, some of them were just straight up lying and stealing,” they pointed out. “Like the ones saying that their items didn’t arrive when it did, etc… They are not even loopholes, they are just lying and being dishonest.”
We also asked the author if they think it’s right for people to be exploiting loopholes. “If it’s not straight up stealing, just exploiting a ‘bug’, then yes,” the OP says.
Next, we asked ZoroX what they thought of the replies to their post. “There were pretty interesting ones, however, some of them were just straight up lying and stealing,” they pointed out. “Like the ones saying that their items didn’t arrive when it did, etc… They are not even loopholes, they are just lying and being dishonest.”
My high school had a stupid rule that banned you from attending prom if you went to a saturday detention that semester. I got in trouble and was assigned to Sat. D-Hall, but my girlfriend really wanted to go to prom. I just kept skipping it and they kept adding more until they rolled it into a day of actual suspension. They had no rule barring you from prom for an out-of-school suspension so I got a day off and took my girl to prom.
Figuring out that if you bring a clipboard and walk with purpose, almost nobody questions why you’re there.
Finally, the author added that, in their opinion, “the biggest loophole glitch discovered ever” was when Australian bartender Dan Saundersfound an ATM glitchin 2011 and ended up spending $1.6 million of the bank’s money. That’s a pretty big glitch!
Discovered that my high school P.E. teacher graded on improvement. You took a skills test at the beginning of each unit, then one at the end of the unit and your grade was based on how much you improved. I was not the most gifted athletically, always got C’s in P.e. before this, so I would tank the opening test, then perform my usual mediocrity at the end, but my improvement was awesome and I became an A student the last semester of high school P.E.
When I was in high school I applied for a summer job with the county. As part of the “unbiased” application process, each applicant was asked to take an intelligence test.The test consisted of about 80 questions. Each question was four or five line drawings, and you had to put an X in the box next to the one that didn’t belong. Pretty easy.I happened to notice, though, that the test paper was two part, which is two sheets of paper that are attached together back-to-back with a sheet of carbon paper in between. I could peel the sheets apart and look inside: the second sheet just had a bunch of boxes printed on it, and I could see from the first few questions that I’d answered that the Xs I’d marked ended up in the printed boxes on the second sheet thanks to the carbon paper.So, I did all of the questions with obvious answers, and if I was unsure, I just peeled the paper apart, noted where the box was printed on the second sheet, and made sure I got it right.Of course, I got 100%. I figure that if you can cheat on an intelligence test, you’re pretty smart.
In one town I lived in parking tickets were cheaper than paying for parking, cost nothing against your license, and the area I parked in had a satellite office right where I parked where I could pay the ticket right away. It wasn’t even that common to get a ticket.
I found these neat things on my pants that keep my belt attached to my pants.
I work at a well known Australian alcohol store, up until very recently the online store would mark down slabs (24 bottles/cans) of several different craft beers from $60-$70 down to $24. This would only happen if you put 24 individual cans or bottles into your cart instead of a slab. This guy would click and collect 24 individual bottles every week.Obviously the staff I worked with weren’t going to unbox a slab into 24 individual bottles so we just gave him a slab.Management told corporate about this several times over years but they did nothing until one day the man came in and said they had closed the loophole, however he was still able to just click re-order and got the same price that he had already been paying.The company makes billions in profits each year, so more power to him!Tldr: infinite $24 slabs of craft beer.
Not mine but many years ago a woman was attending college in Texas and paying out of state tuition. She found out that if you were a business owner in the state you could get in state tuition. She spent a few bucks to file for a business and saved gobs.
Parking at the hospital the pay machine wasn’t working so I drove to the barrier and pressed the button to speak to the attendant / security… A few seconds later, without a word being exchanged in either direction, the barrier opened.This was early on in my dad’s hospital stay of about 9 months.I didn’t try paying again, just pressed the button at the exit barrier…
The local radio always have a contest where you call when they play same artist back to back so you can win a prize. Then I learned they had a “now playing” and “up next” feature on their web site. My girlfriend that time would start calling in before second song even came on. Won a ton prizes including laptops.
There was a drink machine in college that was $.75 for a juice. If you put a dollar in it gave you 5 quarters in change. I got a juice everyday for months before they finally fixed it.
I live in a remote, rural area. We don’t get UPS packages delivered on Tuesdays or Thursdays. When I order Amazon, it gives me the option to choose Friday delivery with a $1-$2 coupon for digital orders. I always choose that option bc I’m not getting a Tuesday/Thursday delivery anyway. So I stack the coupons and get a bunch of kindle books for free.
I had two loopholes that I routinely exploit at work (and I recommend it to my employees, though none have the discipline). It lets me take 1 month of vacation each year, instead of just 2 weeks.Loophole 1: All OT will be matched with PTO/Paid Vacation time.Loophole 2: Clocking in 5 minutes early and Clocking out 5 minutes late will count as OT, but not require manager approval.By Clocking in 5 minutes early to start my shift, out 5 minutes late for lunch, 5-early to come back from lunch, and out 5-late at end of shift, I got 20 minutes of paid OT and 20 minutes of Vacation time each day I worked.Each year, we get 80 hours of PTO, but with my scheme, I get an extra 83 hours and 20 minutes. And that’s not counting any extra PTO I received when asked to work overtime.
I can’t remember when it happened, but it was years ago. I think it was Nestea, or some other canned tea, but if you bought a case of tea then there was a coupon on the box for a free case… except it was on every case, so now you have case #2 and another free case coupon. All the tea could be had.
A few years ago before I could drive, I used to get the bus to work. I would spend about £80 a 4 week on a bus pass each monthOn the app on my phone when I would buy the pass, it would stay on the app unused until I clicked the button then it would start counting down 4 weeks.I figured out if I buy a 4 week ticket and back up my phone whilst it’s unused I could then reinstall the backup after a month and have a new unused 4 week ticketI did this for about 3yrs and saved nearly £3000, I’m still happy about this.
They cottoned on pretty quickly but a few years back, I managed to purchase some buy-one-get-one-free meals from Tesco that were also yellow stickered. The system hadn’t been updated to remove the offer, which meant I ended up effectively being paid to take the food home. For example, I bought two ready meals that were originally priced at £2 each. Normally, they would have cost £2 total with the BOGOF offer, but since they were further reduced to something like 40p each, the full promotion still applied. When I scanned them, the total came to 80p, but the system also refunded me £2.
I was working maintenance at McDonald’s when they did a Best Buy bucks promotion. Large sodas and large fries had a scratch off that was worth at least $1 at Best Buy.I would go through the trash daily, pulling out all the discarded scratch offs.I got a free computer that year for Christmas. I also had the poor cashier at Best Buy in tears. She had to manually scan each scratch off and verify the dollar amount.
In college the local Buffalo Wild Wings would give out like 6 free wings if you did their online survey. I found out they didn’t really put a limit on how many times you could do it and I just so happened to work during the time that the cafeteria was open for Sunday dinner.I had Buffalo Wild Wings damn near every Sunday because I would get six free Wings and something else. I was severely disappointed when I came back next year and the deal was gone.
Bought a pie from supermarket, box came with a token for one free pie.So… bought a pie, went through checkout, removed token from box, went back got another pie, paid with token, and went around again. Filled freezee with pies.
My brother found out that at some point McDonald’s were giving a Big Mac if you bought a 50$ gift card. The thing is that you could buy a 50$ gift card with a 50$ gift card. Needless to say that he got a couple of free burgers during that promotion 😅.
An ex colleague of mine lost his car parking ticket one day and discovered that the car park near our work he used charges you £5 if you lost your ticket; not in addition to what you would have paid, just £5. The daily rate to park there from 9am to 5pm was £9/£10 from memory.After making this discovery, on the days he drove to the office, he would park there from 9 to 5, and when leaving, would tell the car park attendant he lost his ticket, and would only be charged £5 instead of the higher rate he would have otherwise paid for parking.I never had the courage to do it!
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Back in 2013, Papa Johns had a promo for the Super Bowl where if you called the coin toss correctly, you would get a voucher for a free 1 topping pizza. However, the only control in place was you could only enter the contest one time per email address. I created more than 60 emails, half of them calling heads, half tails. Ate free for six weeks.
When I had a Tesla - the garage at my apt building decided to jack up prices, but only start charging after the first 4 hours.As long as I remembered to do it, I would unhook the charger and rehook right before the 4 hour mark. Had a full year of almost entirely free fuel.
Back when soda companies would have promotions on the underside of the bottle caps, I could tilt the soda bottles just right so I could find winners. During many promotions, I paid for 1 initial bottle of soda, a “get a free bottle” winning one, then continually searched and found those never having to pay for a soda.
Pizza Hut recently had an exploitable deal in their app. They had a 2 items for $8 each deal (must buy 2) but I noticed that after I selected the first item (a medium pizza), it was already in the cart. I tried to check out and it let me. Boom.The loophole is now closed but I must have fleeced them for tens of dollars over the past few years.
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Back in the late 90s, when dialup internet was still the main thing, I created a company for myself over the summer as I wanted to learn to run my own business, and I just wanted to be official. Just odd jobs, yard work, cleaning, maintenance. Typical teenager skilled stuff.I created a business internet account through Sprint I paid like $25/month for the dedicated line and internet with unlimited hours. I shut the business down at end of the summer heading back into my senior year. I abandoned it essentially. I unlinked my payments, but I never canceled the internet account. I kept using it and I just expected it to shut down one day because I no longer had a business account paying the bill and the business was shuttered.I used that dialup internet account for the next 3 years til I abandoned it myself upgrading to DSL. What’s even crazier is I found I could have a friend login on that same account as me at same time as well and it would work. I never received any delinquent bills aside from thr very first one to the business address, a PO Box I had, saying I missed my payment, and only 1 time ever.
Not really a loophole, more if semi-unethical life tip.Back in the late 90’s early 00’s I went to Vegas 3-4 times. I’m from Canada and back then I carried Traveler’s Cheques. The were Visa branded and in Candian currency. They looked identical to the US currency cheques, except the they said “CAN” under the denomination instead of “US”.I went to a cash cage at a casino and cashed one of my cheques, and instead of converting it to US funds, they gave them to me at par! At the time $1 CAN would get you about $0.77 US!Went back an hour later did it again and I got US funds, then she said “wait” that’s a CAN cheque. Took the US funds back did the conversion, and I got the lesser amount.But I found I had about a 75% success rate with cash tellers not paying attention!
Transferring credit card balances between balance transfer cards until I no longer had a balance, it would push the payment dates back each time allowing me to save money to pay off more.
In high school civics class, the teacher would ask current events questions. Then, at the end, he would ask a couple today in history questions. I found out that he got those questions out of the local newspaper EVERY day. I would memorize the answers and get them all right. Got tons on bonus points, and everyone thought I was a history buff.
Working in a call center for a large phone company, clicking your mouse really fast on the screen caused it to go into some mode where it looks like you’re waiting for a call as normal, but you’ll never have a call come through. Some kid figured it out, and the trick spread to a bunch of people and was kept under wraps from management. We passed it down to others as we onboarded them if they were deemed trustworthy, haha.
Are there any pay phones around anywhere anymore? A long time ago I was using a pay phone when there was a blackout. The electricity came back on within 5 minutes. The phone started dumping all the change into the coin return space. I must’ve gotten 4-5 bucks! It was 1978 so 4-5 bucks was more then 😂. I promptly drove to every other pay phone I could find. It was a good day!
I used to bartend at Uno’s … every fall we’d sell gift cards for X-mas. For every $20 sold we’d give a $5 coupon that could be redeemed after the New Year. I’d buy myself a GC and then use it when people paid cash then keep recharging the GC and accumulate all the extra $5 coupons. I literally spent $0 total dollars on the GC but would get around $1000 coupons every year.
Worked in a bank who gave staff half price credit cards. Interest was 18% so my card charged 9%. Term deposits were paying 14%. I would take out a cash advance (no charges for staff) and put that money in a term deposit- getting 14% paying back credit card at 9%. Saved a ton of money.
I have over 26 GB of free storage in my Dropbox account.Not sure if it still works this way, but like 15 years ago they would give you like +500 MB of space for each signup you referred, up to like 50 referrals (or maybe it was +1 GB and ~25 referrals?). But they had to actually install and activate the client for you to get the credit.I set up a little Linux VM and created a save point with just a browser and an un-activated Dropbox client install in it. Then I used a bunch of throwaway emails to send a c**p-ton of referrals.For each one I would boot the VM, process the next referral in the list, then (and this was the key) shut the VM down and change its MAC ID. Rinse and repeat. As long as the MAC ID changed, Dropbox saw each one as a separate thing.I probably could have automated it, but I got the process down pretty good so I just spent an evening grinding through them while watching basketball or something. Took a couple hours total.
When I was a young ski bum we discovered phone operators counted the coins going into the phone for long distance calls to make sure correct amount paid. Quarters made one sound, dimes another… We tape recorded $20 worth of quarters going into a payphone (with pauses at $5 increments so we could keep track) and just played the tape when the operator told us how much call would cost. Worked like a charm all winter - our parents were quite impressed we weren’t calling them collect. And one of the guys in our cabin came from France.
There was a loophole in Sweden on Libero diapers. They sent out coupons to new parents. And the coupons could be used in ”selfcheckout”, and you only had to scan it, and you could keep it.So everytime we bought diapers we could use almost everyone weve got. Adding up to 50-80% off every time.It worked for a year i think, before they fixed it.
Many cheap (under $10) items on Amazon qualify for “returnless returns”, meaning if you start a return for the item you are issued a refund and prompted that there is no need to actually return it.
I used to live in NYC and would travel quite a bit. I had a car in the city (wouldn’t recommend) and me and my wife figured out it was cheaper to park in a neighborhood in Queens outside of JFK, walk over to the airport, and just get a parking ticket and pay it, then it would have been if we just parked at the airport for an extended amount of time.
In D&D 5e, you can use a lance one-handed so long as you’re mounted. And if you take the Dual Wielder feat, you can dual wield any weapons that aren’t two-handed. Since lances are weird, they do not have the “two-handed” property, nor do they count as “heavy” weapons. You can dual-wield lances. It’s fun.
We figured out that on our country’s biggest website for takeout food that if you go all the way to the payment screen, then click the ‘back’ button on the browser, not the website, enter a tip for the driver and then proceed with the process you only pay the tip and the order still gets delivered.We did this twice and then the glitch was patched.
There was a shuffle you could do on the McDonald’s self serve screens where you’d add a cheeseburger and take all the toppings off, they’d refund a bit for every topping, and you’d be left with $-0.10 at the end. Do it like 50 times and you got a free meal. We did it once or twice to get a free drink in summer before they changed it.
Felt like a giant win for me…my favorite fast casual restaurant had a coupon at the bottom of their receipts for a free meal if you filled out the survey. I figured out the pattern of the code and brought in a new code every time. I was getting free meals like 2x a week for over a year.
When I was in high school in the 70s, it cost a dime to make a local call. We found out if you put a nickel in the slot, and pressed the return coin button at the right time, the coin would be returned and we’d get a dial tone to make the call!
My roommate after college worked at a large search engine and the company would give employees free ad space on the website if they wanted it so we made ads to sign up for Uber using our referral codes where we would get $20 per sign up. We basically rode (Uber) and ate (uber eats) for free for 1.5 years. I forget why we stopped but there was some reason it stopped working.
In college I discovered that if I had a balance of less than $10 on my credit card for more than a month they would do a SBW (Small balance wipe out). So every two months for years I used the card for something less than $10.
Used to be able to get cheap flights on easyJet. this doesn’t work anymore so I can share it freely. we kept it secret for a while to try and not raise any alarms over there.basically with the flexi fare you could change departure AND destination within the same price range, and you could change dates for each route.meaning you’d pick a random flight that was cheap on selected dates and expensive in others. move it to those dates, and then choose another flight in that price range but which you could change the dates for even more expensive..repeat until you can get the flight you need. regularly for 300 euros flights for 20.. very useful especially to travel around the holidays.
Back in the early 2000s, Seattle Apartment buildings also rented “parking”. You pay a month’s parking fee, make a deposit for a garage door opener and that’s it.No tag whatsoever, either you had their garage door clicker or you didn’t.I moved around a bit across the city so I would pay for parking for a month and just keep the clickers and forgoing the $30 or so for each remote. I figured there’s no way building managers will reprogram remotes for all their residents every six months. So I’d at least be able to keep parking for six months which will save me $400-600. Turns out they did not reprogram remotes … ever.I stayed in Seattle for six years, and I had free secure parking in at least four neighbourhoods across the city.
In high school a couple of friends and i discovered that you could purchase prepaid sim cards with more balance on them than what they did cost, plus get an additional $7 in cashback for every sim card ordered. We extensively used this to fund our leauge of legends skin collections.And even better, at some point the carrier blocked us from purchasing more sim cards, but the cashback site we used still counted the purchase attempt as valid and credited our accounts. After a few months and multiple hundred dollars for each of us, the cashback site fixed the loop hole. Nowadays most sites take months for cashback to be paid out. Probably rightfully so.
GameStop used to have like a 10 day return policy on used games. So me and my roommate in college would buy used games, beat them and return them. Essentially we got to rent games for free. We did this for years until the company caught on and started marking receipts and keeping track.
Our wedding registry gives you something like a 20% discount on purchases for a period after the wedding.They also let you ship your gifts at your own pace, so we waited until after the honeymoon to ship gifts.When we returned from our honeymoon we found out we could just turn all of our gifts we got into registry cash and buy everything at a 20% discount.So we had a nice chunk of money left over to buy other items.
This one is an old old school low-tech one (we are talking 50 years ago): soda vending machines used to contain bottles loaded horizontally, with the cap facing out. There was a pawl-like piece of metal that would prevent the bottle from being removed until money was inserted (the bottle was wider behind the pawl).Some smart aleck figured out that you could get a glass and a bottle opener and just pop off the cap and let the soda pour out into the glass.
A kid was put on probation with me because he figured out the tokens from the local arcade were recognized as quarters at a bank’s self-serve coin exchange machine.
I joined the military for what was supposed to be a 6 year commitment. I was a reserve. Had to go to basic training and an “A” school (to be a radioman). that took 8 months and then I was released from active duty and had to go to meetings once a month and 2 weeks of duty in the summer. I found out that a reserve could only spend 2 years total of active duty. So, I said screw the meetings and just stopped going. That was, of course, not acceptable to them (U.S. Coast Guard) so they ordered me to active duty, on board a cutter ported in New York City (I had some fun there!). After 16 months they had to give me an honorable discharge. So I actually spent 2 years and 8 months total in the Coast Guard instead of 6 years. Worked out well.
In college, I realized that if you returned a book to the library one minute before closing, they wouldn’t have time to check it back in until the next day, so it technically wouldn’t count as overdue. Saved myself a ton of late fees with that trick.
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