I think there is some kind of morality when it comes to taking advantage of loopholes. If you’re getting a little something over on THE MAN or a huge corporation, it’s no big deal.
But if you’re screwing over a small business or an individual or something like that, we’re talking about something different.
But one thing is for sure: people are gonna take every shortcut they possibly can…for better or worse.
Folks on AskReddit admitted what loopholes they exploited until they couldn’t do it anymore. Let’s take a look.
1. They figured it out.
“I had a killer racket in school.
I would buy the graduating classes used textbooks for like $5 and then sell them to a third party book seller in the next town over who would pay me between $25 & $30 for each one.
Eventually people started asking questions and others figured out the deal.”
2. You got skills!
“Photoshopped a college parking pass to hang in my rear view mirror, complete with a fake barcode.
Even had it laminated.
Free parking for 3 years, saved 250/year.”
3. Time to redeem the tickets.
“There was a machine at an arcade similar to Dave and Busters called Round 1.
One day, im there with a group of friends, and I go to the prize area. I see three kids with funko pop dolls stacked over there heads, headed to the register. I jokingly ask what their secret was. They won’t tell me, so I said I’d tell them my ticket making secret in exchange (mine sucked)
They inform me there’s a machine giving more tickets than normal. I go find it and it’s one of those mobile games turned arcade machines that no one would ever play. I play it once and get 700 tickets for probably $0.50.
To put in perspective, a 3DS was 40,000 tickets. I play it for about an hour, and get enough for a 3DS. We got so good at the game, wed win the jackpot everytime and itd give us 6000 tickets. It would take 15 minutes for the machine to just count it all.
Long story short, my friends and I stayed all day the next day and made enough tickets to get 2 PS4s, 2 Wii US, and 2 3DSs. It was such a lame game, no one ever bothered to try and play it besides us.
They eventually found out later that day, as they walked over to me while I was playing to observe the game. I just walked out, drove to one a town over just to be safe and redeemed all my tickets.”
4. Rewards.
“Worked at a grocery store as a cashier for about 5 years.
They had a reward system where you scan a points card every purchase and eventually end up getting back about 1% of the money you spend. But every time a customer didn’t have a points card, and didn’t want one, those potential points would go to waste.
I couldn’t scan my own card, so I went to a different location and signed up for a new card with a fake name. Then I just photocopied the bar code from my points card, and taped it to the bottom of my wrist.
So for a few years, every time I had a customer that didn’t want to become a member, I rolled up my sleeve for a second and scanned my wrist and all their points would go to my untraceable fake account.
After it was all said and done, by the time I quit that job and moved on I walked out of there with thousands of dollars toward free groceries.”
5. It adds up.
“Printers at the university had a flaw that let you print out any number of pages while just paying for a single page.
I told too many people about it and they eventually fixed the problem but I was able to print for really cheap and save a ton on printing.
I normally am not the kind of person to do this, but our professor made us print out 20 page state diagrams instead of just submitting them electronically, and I wasn’t going to pay for that.”
6. Bacon!
“Whole Foods used to have bacon on the Breakfast Bar.
Cooked bacon weighs almost nothing! I would get a pound of cooked bacon for $8.00 It lasted almost a week!
Bacon crumbles for the salad, for the turkey sandwich, and the 100 other things that you can toss bacon into!
I used this method for almost a year, then they stopped putting bacon out….sigh……”
7. I hope you’re hungry.
“I used to work at a grocery store and we had this era of the steak discounts.
Hundreds of coupons for $5 off a steak were just everywhere for some reason. I found out that if I used the self checkout and bought a steak that was less than $5 while using the coupon, the machine would give me back the difference in change.
I ate dozens of free steaks and filled my change jar up nicely.”
8. Netflix and pizza.
“When I was in college they had this deal where if you signed up for a free trial of Netflix you could get a $10 giftcard code for Papa John’s.
They didn’t even ask for a credit card back then, just an email, so I would just make new email addresses to use and would get a code every time.
Not only did I get free Netflix for a while, but I also got a lot of free pizza.”
9. Whoa!
“When Lyft first came out, they were giving away free rides up to like $20-30 if I remember correctly, all you had to do was refer a friend.
So me and my college roommate just made a few email address, and somehow my free rides glitched and I just kinda had free rides for the year.”
10. Time to do laundry.
“At my current apartment complex, they just changed the laundry machines so you need to use this super sh*tty slow app.
I found out if you press start on the app and start on the machine and then back out of the app while it’s “chatting” with the machine, the machine will start but won’t charge any money.
Been washing and drying for free for a few months.”
11. Working overtime…kind of…
“The thing we clocked in on when I worked at Kmart would round to the closest quarter hour.
So by clocking in 8 minutes early, and clocking out 8 minutes after my shift, I got paid for 30 minutes rather than for the 16 minutes. By exploiting this, I was paid 2.5 hours of overtime a week.
Cumulatively, during my time there, this added up to about 6.5 weeks of extra pay. I wasn’t ever caught, though.”
12. Score!
“There was a soda machine that was really old that would still charge $.25 for a can of soda.
Pretty soon I realized that it would give you a can for free if you just mash the buttons repeatedly.
It was the best part of grocery shopping.”
13. They didn’t check.
“Hungry Jack’s (Aussie Burger King) has a “check in on your phone and get a random deal” thing.
A few years back, I ended up rolling a full combo meal.
Took a screenshot and got free food for months because they never checked if it was legit or not.”
14. A loyal customer.
“I went to a sporting goods store and they asked me for my phone number when I was paying.
I was in a bad mood and didn’t want to fight with the clerk so I told them our local area code + 555-1212 (which is the old number for directory assistance), clerk accepted it and I left. When I checked my receipt I had a huge number of loyalty points – because apparently a ton of other people did the same thing.
I called the office the next day and switched the “account” to my new address. A half-dozen times over the next few years, I went and got free stuff with all the points that I kept racking up as one of their most loyal customers.”
15. Season ticket holder.
“Years ago I was a season ticket holder for an awful NBA team. My tickets came electronically via PDF. I had OK seats in the upper part of the lower bowl, but nothing great.
Anyway, on nights where I knew it would be empty (which was most nights unless a superstar like Kobe or LeBron was in town), I would use the full version of Adobe Acrobat to edit the PDF’s to indicate a much better seat location than mine.
The bar code still scanned just fine because I didn’t mess with it, but when the usher took my print out all he saw was that I was sitting on the floor.
Got away with it for years until the team actually got good for a while and the place was packed.”
16. You want fries with that?
“The McDonald’s app used to have an entry in the order book for “garlic parmesan fries” that you only found through the search option. It cost $0.00. Every time I ordered it I got free regular fries.
Also you can set the drink option on happy meals to coffee, which is not really a loop hole, but handy.”
17. The key to the kingdom.
“I was really good friends with my building superintendent (super) at a job I have since left. He was also the super for several other buildings in downtown.
My friend, the super, got a terminal cancer diagnosis and on his last day at the building he gives me an envelope with what appeared to be a parking garage card inside. He said “you have been such a great friend I wanted to give you my key to the kingdom. It should save you a lot of money because it works in every city owned parking garage in downtown.”
I left that job in 2012 and to this day the card still works at over 12 parking garages in downtown. Go see a concert or sporting event? Swipe the card for the O-rena (no longer the official name) garage.
Need to park at the courthouse or city hall garage, swipe the card. Want to go see a movie or go to a club or park? Swipe swipe swipe, free parking day or night.
Bruce you left us way too soon, but gave me a gift that just never stops giving. Miss you buddy, and thanks for saving me a ton of money.”
18. Pulling a fast one.
“Parking meters took credit cards. But they weren’t actually connected to a live network at all times.
The machine just confirmed the card number was valid and was not expired, then spit out a valid pass. So when my card number got stolen and replaced, I kept my old, cancelled card. Of course when the system tried to run the card later it would be declined.
My car and I were long gone by then. Sadly they wised up and now it charges your card before giving you a pass.”
19. Jackpot!
“Worked out how to get the jackpot every time on a Connect 4 fruit machine in a pub I used to drink in.
It would cost about £5-£10 before you’d get into the bonus round, then when you did, you’d play a connect 4 game against the machine.
You place the first counter, and then after the machine places the next counter, you mirror the machines move. Every game ends in a draw, and you win the jackpot, which was £50.
The pub landlord removed the machine after around 3 months as it was regularly empty, basically paid for my drinking and more for 3 months!”
20. Makin’ money!
“When I was a kid, there was a pay phone down the street.
If you put your quarter in, made a call and no one answered, it would give you back two quarters.
I went there all the time and called home when I knew no one was there to answer.”
21. I’ll take that.
“My friend used to restock condom machines in pubs and collect the money from them.
The machines would always break and get jammed all the time but because it was condoms no one would ever tell someone that the machine ate their money.
He would just count how many condoms were gone and give that amount of money to the company and pocket the rest.”
22. Sneaky.
“When I was in school they sent us home with a form for our parents to fill in. The idea was to collect updated contact information in case anything had changed (phone numbers etc).
If you were late to school, the school texted your parents to let them know. For myself, the usual punishment was a grounding.
I was frequently late, so I filled the form with my own phone number and started to receive the text messages that were intended to tell my parents that I was late.
Got grounded far less frequently after that.”
23. You brought them down.
“One week the local Chick-fil-a put a coupon in a local coupon magazine flyer which was Buy 1, Get 1 Free, any item on the menu. Next to that coupon they had a 50% off any menu item.
I carefully checked, and neither coupon mentioned “Cannot be combined with any other offer” anywhere on it. So I ran out to the local grocery store and grabbed a stack of these flyers. Sure enough the next week the offer was gone, but it was too late to stop me.
I spent almost 2 years as a grad student living almost exclusively off of 128-count nugget platters that I would get for 25% of the cost (1st half off, 2nd free). Place went under new management and they put up a sign saying they would no longer be accepting those coupons.
Not entirely sure if that was due solely to me or if anyone else was pulling the same thing. I had about 20 coupon pairs left when they shut it down.”
Okay, it’s confession time…
In the comments, share some of your own stories about taking advantage of loopholes until you couldn’t anymore.
We can’t wait to hear from you!