20 Loopholes People Exploited For Years

1.

When I was in college they had this deal where if you signed up for a free trial of Netflix you could get a $10 gift code for Papa John's. They didn't even ask for a credit card back then, just an email, so I would just use make new email addresses and would get a code every time. Not only did I get free Netflix for a while, but I also got a lot of free pizza.

2.

I used to frequent a sandwich shop (they've since closed) that could be very busy at times due to how close it was to a convention hall. The process for ordering food was much like that of Subway: approach the counter, tell them what you want, you get to sit there and watch them construct your sandwich. They had room enough for three sandwich makers: two people behind the counter and one guy manning the back area for pick up orders. They almost always had a guy dedicated to the pickup window and during peak times he would help out, but his priority was phone orders. The window was marked "Pick up for phone orders only!" There were many times (when the inside was packed with customers) where I would literally stand outside this window placing an order on my cell phone with the phone order guy laughing and shaking his head while he took my order and made my sandwich. I could see the customers in line inside and they could clearly see me. One time, a customer in line got pissed and started complaining about me "cutting the line" and that I couldn't place my order at the window since it was for phone orders only. The guy behind the counter said that there wasn't anything wrong with what I did since I did place my order over the phone, I just happened to be standing at the window when I did it.

3.

Not sure if it's a loophole but I was remoting in from home to work because of COVID. Since I'm salary I don't log in or submit a time card. Instead they require all employees (hourly or salary) to log in on Skype so they can track how long you're online. Except that they didn't disable the settings so I have my status remain "available" for 20 minutes of inactivity so I can take 50 minute lunches and not get docked for it.

4.

Was on a cruise ship a few years ago that had a pay-per-minute Internet policy. You’d buy like 200 minutes of wifi access for $100 or whatever crazy price it was. They had a little portal that you went to, to start and stop the timer, and tell you how much time was remaining. I quickly realized that the timer counted by whole minutes. That is, if I started at 12:00:01, and stopped it at 12:00:58, then it counted as 0 minutes of internet use. For the entire cruise I took advantage of this. Start the timer, fire up your internet apps like Facebook and Instagram and let your timeline and emails download, or launch a website and let it load. Stop the timer. Browse your feed and photos and read your website and emails offline, compose posts and replies etc. Start the timer again to send/upload, stop it again within a minute. I milked those 200 minutes for an entire 3 week cruise and still had 45 minutes left over at the end.

5.

Not me, but a friend of mine (among others I'd assume) managed to get an entire sales campaign cancelled that a bank in my country did. IIRC the bank tried to promote one of their debit cards (which are basically prepaid credit cards) via some bonuses and gifts you'd get as customer, e.g. one of 20 products you can choose for free if you start using it etc. One of these bonuses they offered was a small payback, you'd get after each purchase. What they did was basically rounding up the amount you paid (to full Euros) and give you the difference. So if you bought something for 27.63€ you'd get 37 cents gifted from this bank. What he then did was only possible because we were university students back then, had very flexible work time and some of our friends were temping in super markets... he went to the super market our friends worked at at times when basically no one else was there and purchased hundreds of single potatoes. Each one = one purchase with the card. Depending on their weight each of these potatoes was like 2ct or 3ct, so for each purchase he got 98ct or 97ct gifted from the bank, making him profit about 94-96ct for each potato. He got about 250€ (plus an unreasonable amount of free potatoes) in 2 days with this until the bank called him like "uh... could you like maybe stop that...?" and he just shamelessly responded "why?" to which the bank person on the phone had no good answer. So then he just went on and made some more money until the whole incentive thing got completely cancelled a few days later. Fun times.

6.

When I was at university, the pay-for campus printers all worked on a system where you'd print your documents, release them at the printer, they'd print, then after they finished printing, it would contact the server to get the cost deducted from your balance. That final step always took a while and I discovered in my first year that if I cancelled the print job as the final page was rolling out of the printer, it wouldn't deduct the cost from my balance. With this method I got free printing for nearly two years before they upgraded the system!

7.

My school had uniforms, it was kinda strict with those... but nowhere in the rules it stated that girls should wear the female uniform and boys the male uniform. Sooooooo, I bought the male one and wore it. A lot of teachers wanted to give me detention, but when I went over the school rule book and s**t, they had to stay steaming mad because I was not breaking any rules. They assumed it was implied, but the only think stated was that the uniform was to be worn properly, be clean and fit well, but that's it. By the time I graduated, a lot of students were doing about the same s**t I was. That rule changed shortly after my generation went off to university. sorry kiddos, maybe you will find new loopholes to give the inspector an aneurism

8.

Not sure if it counts as a loophole, but I worked at a books/music/video store when I was in high school. We were supposed to remove the "in training" portion of our name tags after the first two weeks. I just left mine on so that customers wouldn't ask me questions. A full year of hardly anyone talking to me at work was the best full year of my life.

9.

In college there was a parking garage that charged around $2/hour. I couldn't get a parking pass but learned the heated garage that charged $2/hour had a $20 fee for a lost ticket. I would park my car in there for a few weeks at a time and when I had to leave would "lose" my ticket and be forced to pay the $20 lost ticket fee. A parking pass was around $500 to park outside and all I payed were lost ticket fees to park in the heated garage.

10.

Several years ago AT&T was running a trade-in promotion increasing the value of old iPhones way beyond what they were selling for on eBay / CL at the time. This promo thankfully wasn’t bundled to a new phone purchase and could be done on any active line of service with AT&T - so no limits on phone trade-ins. I ended up buying 31 old iPhone 4s for about $70 each on eBay and trading them all in to AT&T on promotion for $200. Worked out to $6200 in AT&T credits. I got myself 2 iPads, and 2 new iPhones at the time, and enough of a credit on my bill I didn’t pay for cell phone service for almost 2 years. I really miss this type of promotion!!

11.

I was visiting a hospital on a daily basis for many weeks (premature twin babies), but they didn't do multi-use discounts. It was costing something like £5 - £10 per day, until a few days in I realized that the hospital had only recently appointed the car parking company and they hadn't yet installed the "arrival time" machine at the car park entrance which you were meant to use on your arrival. And from that day on I got my "arrival time" ticket when I was leaving and only paid minimum stay.

12.

When my brothers and I were 6-10 years old we found a crane candy game where you were “guaranteed to win” something. We found a laser sensor in the area where you pick up your prize. This indicated whether or not something had dropped. So, by holding the flap door open at the bottom the sensor was never triggered so for 25 cents we nearly emptied the machine. Thanks Red Robin!

13.

Carl’s Jr. app offered something like 10 points for “checking-in” each time you visited. Once you had 100 points you could get a free $6 burger. Well, I figured out the “checking-in” counted as long as your cell phone was within maybe 100 yards or so of the restaurant. And I drive past a Carl’s Jr. right before my house. So I would check in on the way to work each morning and check in again on the way home. Free burger every 5 days.

14.

Had intermittent anemia in college that I was trying to improve. But the blood work was about $100 each time. I started donating blood and if I was too low they’d turn me away and I’d keep trying to up my iron. If I was high enough, I got to donate to a good cause. Win win!

15.

I bought a card once for $10 that had 16 coupons for a BOGO pizza from Dominos. They were little stickers that you were supposed to pull off and hand in when using them, but they never asked for the stickers. They also didn't have an expiration on them. They also didn't tell anyone it was supposed to be one per order. We'd order 8 pizzas at a time, used them for two years. Thousands of dollars of free pizza really help when you're a broke college kid.

16.

Years ago, Burger King sold mugs that you could refill for free any time at all. With soda or even shakes. My friends and I would bring a single mug, go in and get a chocolate shake, go back to the car to move the contents to another mug, go back in and repeat until all of us got free chocolate shakes. We did this regularly for about two years of high school.

17.

Years ago I would buy a few games at a time. Some of the games I'd play for a few hours before deciding I didn't like the game. Since the games were opened, the store I bought them from wouldn't take it back. HOWEVER, I learned that Walmart would exchange the game for you, no questions asked without opening the new game. So I'd go to Walmart to 'exchange' a defective game, take the new, unopened game to the store I originally bought it from and return it for full price. Oops.

18.

We had a situation at my old job, (a huge, international company), where we’d work shifts, either 8/10/12 hours. Anything after 8 hours was overtime. Sometimes we were scheduled for the next shift quite soon after the last one had ended, for example 05:00-12:00 and then 19:00-00:00. Someone discovered that if there were less than 8 hours between shifts in a 24-hour period, anything after 8 hours total was paid the overtime rate. We did it for ages and then in the context of some team chat, some idiot asked one of the managers whether the above scheduling would still be feasible. Turned out the management hadn’t even noticed and stopped it immediately. And back to minimum wage we went.

19.

I lived near a casino that would let you get chips using your credit card. I liked some of the shows and restaurants there but never gambled. So every time I went I'd charge $5K to my credit card for chips. Then I'd cash out at a different teller and swing by the bank on the way home to deposit the money and pay off my credit card. I did this maybe once a week. Boom $5K of free credit card points / cash back.

20.

On Airbnb, some hosts allow you to change the date of the booking without any additional charges, (but would charge you if you cancelled the booking within certain hours), so if I had to cancel my booking without losing money I would change the date of my reservation to a month ahead of what it is currently and then in a couple of days cancel my reservation and get a full refund.

21.

Dating myself here, but in the late 80s, soda machines had just begun accepting dollar bills. You could take a bill and apply a piece of clear packing tape to it. Once the machine took the dollar, you could pull it back out using the tape. Free coke, but the best part was that you got change back! Paying you to drink a coke.

22.

When searching for sources on essays teachers warned not to use Wikipedia. On the other hand, he said noting about Wikipedia's own sources. The final product is so different that not even a software can make find similarities.

23.

In high school when I had a page count for an essay I would make the font size for periods, commas, apostrophes, etc. 2 numbers bigger than the essay text. In a decent sized essay it would tack on a page which was nice. For word count essays I would just make random words at the bottom and then make the text white. Didn’t work as well on online submissions like Turnitin.

24.

When I was a kid and we used real mail, I figured out if you reverse the addresses, you don't need a stamp. The postal service will just "send it back" to the return address. Haven't bought stamps in over 20 years!