32 Clever Loopholes People Found and Exploited

1.

When the U.S. government issued the Sacagawea dollar coin, they wanted to get them into circulation as quickly as possible so they'd catch on (Narrator: they didn't), so they had a thing where you could order them and have them shipped to you for free. People realized you could pay for the coins using one of those credit cards that gives you frequent flier miles as a reward. So you order $1000 of coins, put it on the card, get the coins, deposit them into your bank, pay off the credit card. You've just gotten 100% free frequent flier miles.

2.

Guy from Russia, if I remember right, scanned a credit card agreement offer he recieved, changed all the terms to be in his favor and sent it back, they let him use the card but ended up taking him to court. He won because they didn't read their terms and conditions that he had altered!!!

3.

I used to work in a call center doing tech support for a dial-up ISP. The 10 hour plan was $9.99 and then there were various tiers including an unlimited plan for $50 or something like that. I ended up moving to a different city and called up the call center to set up internet and I asked for the 10 hour plan. The guy (who didn't know I used to work there) tried to talk me into a bigger plan, but I stuck with the 10 hour plan. Why? Because the company had no system for monitoring usage. You could use as much data as you wanted and it was all the same to them. There was no tracking system in place.

4.

Little community center/arcade where I used to live as a kid had an air hockey table in the back room. Somebody figured out that if you jimmy the coin slot in just the right way, you could get an extra 3-4 games out of one quarter until the thing was fully pressed in and you'd have to put in a new one. None of us had much money, so this was a lifesaver. The employees didn't really care because what money we did have was typically spent at the snack bar, so they made money off us anyway. I kind of miss that place. They always had fresh watermelon for free for kids who had absolutely no money so nobody would feel left out.

5.

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.

6.

In West Virginia there was a law that waived taxes for automobile title transfers between parents and children. A friend wanted to buy a car from his uncle. So the uncle sold the car to his father who then sold it to his other son who sold it to his own son, my friend. Three transactions. Zero taxes.

7.

There was a promotion a bunch of years back where Hoover included a plane ticket to select destinations around the world (from Europe) with any purchase of one of their products over $100. People could buy a vacuum that was like $109 and get a $600 plane ticket for it. Hoover ended up having to have people work crazy overtime to fulfill the demand for the cheapest model, and eventually they stopped honoring the promotion, which caused the people who hadn’t collected on it yet to sue them. The company made 30 million from the promotion and lost 50 million in plane tickets and legal fees

8.

Torvill and Dean’s bolero at the 1984 Winter Olympics lasted 4 minutes and 18 seconds, but Olympic rules state that performances can’t be longer than 4 minutes. However, the timer doesn’t begin until the skates touch the ice, so they did the first 20ish seconds of their performance on their knees.

9.

I am the lucky beneficiary of a loophole: Back in the 1960s, a 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 was a scholarship fund for people living in that old district's area (like me). The district is gone, but the scholarship still exists! I applied, and got the scholarship. I don't think there were any other applicants.

10.

A man in China purchased a first-class plane ticket — and used it to eat a year’s worth of free meals at the VIP lounge at Xi’an International Airport. The frequent diner purchased a first-class, fully refundable ticket aboard Eastern China Airline. He used the ticket to gain access to the airport’s VIP lounge, where high-rolling travelers dine for free, according to a report last week in the Chinese-language newspaper Kwong Wah Yit Poh in Malaysia. The man re-booked his first-class ticket over and over again and kept the gravy train rolling. Eastern China Airlines officials only recently figured out the man’s scheme after noticing his single ticket being re-booked 300 times over one year, according to the newspaper report. Airline officials admitted there was nothing they could do to stop the frequent diner. A spokeswoman for the carrier called the man’s free-meal scheme a “rare act.” Still, Eastern China Airlines officials confronted him, and the human meal ticket stopped chowing down. The freeloader ended up cashing in his fully refundable ticket and getting back all his money.

11.

Went to a private school where the teachers were real power hungry sh*t heads, you could get in trouble for having your shirt untucked, and some would be real a*s bags about it, literally crouched down and scooting along the benches at lunch time, ie even at lunch if it popped out while sitting you could get in trouble, I ran through the school hand book and it said sweaters with the school emblem can be worn at any time, so I bought one 3 sizes too big and wore it constantly, it went down to almost my knees and I would happily announced that I wasn't even wearing the uniform shirt let alone tucking it in. the a*s teachers got pissed off and took it to the school dean but I was right and it was allowed, like half the school switched to sweaters after that.

12.

There was once a big uproar at some sporting event where the venue had an exclusive deal with Aquafina or Dasani, and they HAD to sell only that water. Any vendor on premise was forbidden from selling any other bottled water. So the vendors started doing this: They posted signs saying, "Single peanut for sale, $1, free water bottle included with every peanut purchase." Genius.

13.

The promotion at subway were you would get a free 6 inch sub if you bought a 25$ gift card. Then you buy another gift card with your 25$ gift card and get an other sub. You could do that to infinity the year after they changed it so you cant buy gift cards with gift cards

14.

When I was in college, a parking sticker to park your car on campus was something like $250 a semester. Senior year, we were sick of this, so I bought one, stuck it on my car, (it was front facing and stuck to the inside of your window facing out) and then we took a high resolution photo of it. We edited the photo on a laptop and sent it to a sticker making company. They printed a sheet of those for like 8 bucks. We got a couple pages of stickers and gave them out to our trusted friends. As long as no one parked illegally or next to each other on campus, there was no reason parking police would notice we had the same parking number. Never got caught and saved a ton of money because we split the price of the original sticker. 10/10 would do it again. But you best believe I came out of that place with 45k in student loans, but that’s a separate issue.

15.

In the Netherlands you can get crazy discounts in the december month with a coupon in the mac Donalds app. But these coupons would expire after like 4 min so you couldn’t use it all day. The loophole was that you just could screenshot the QR-code on the coupon and use is al day. Oooh I gained so many kilograms that december. Dont mind my bad english btw..its not my mother Tongue you know.

16.

i still use the loophole of jumping on a shuttle bus out of LAX to a parking garage(/or hotel, yes) and then calling an Uber/Lyft from there to avoid the airport prices. Brings the ride home down to $10 from $40.

17.

Some McDonalds have a 4 piece nugget on the dollar menu. It's often cheaper to buy 3 of those (12 nuggets and three sauces) and a fry separately than it is to buy the 10 piece meal.

18.

A good shot but not eventually a real loophole was the "drink Pepsi, get a Harrier jet" guy. In 1996, Pepsi ran a promotion where you could collect points by buying Pepsi products. The more points you got, the more stuff you could get, such as t-shirts, free Pepsi, sunglasses, etc. They also had a commercial where they advertised a Harrier jet for 7 million points. One guy read the rules of the promotion and found that you could buy points fo $0.10. That means to get 7 million points you'd have to pay $700,000. The going cost for a Harrier at the time was about $20 million or so. So, one guy raised the money, bought the points and demanded the jet. When Pepsi refused he sued them. He lost, but it was a good try.

19.

One time the local mall was having a guitar hero contest back when those games were super popular. Whoever got the most points on a song throughout the whole day won tickets to see Stone Temple Pilots. What they didn’t know was their contest was fatally flawed to anyone that actually knew the game. If you play a song on expert like cherub rock and hit most of the notes, you will naturally get a higher scorer than if you hit every note in a song like Mississippi queen just because there are way more notes in the song, so that’s what I did, played cherub rock and got a score of a couple hundred thousand, and no one beat it the rest of the day, and I won the tickets.

20.

In the shipyard, you gotta have safety glasses. If you lose them, our safety department makes you talk to your boss's boss and have him write a note saying that he talked to you so you can have another pair of glasses. Well, I walked in to the safety office without safety glasses and asked for another pair. They said to go get a note. I then asked if they were going to let me walk out without any safety glasses. They knew that wasn't allowed, so they gave me a scratched up pair. Well, the reason they had those on hand is because you can trade your scratched ones for new ones. So I took the scratched ones, dealt with them for a day, and then went in the next day and traded them in for new ones. Never had to talk to my boss's boss and get a note.

21.

When you're playing a phone game that wants to charge you extra to play without ads. These are between levels and sometimes during play. As the game is loading (before you start playing) turn on airplane mode and the game now runs ad free. The trick is to let it load THEN turn off your connection. You can't save your progress online, but it's a small price to pay for preventing full-screen ads with no timer or x. Some of these games will actually tell you that you're playing the ad-free version when you do this.

22.

Here's the one that saved me $100. For some f*cking reason, my car got towed from a Taco Bell parking lot while I was at a store next door for only a few minutes. $100, cash only, to get it back, because typical towing company. I looked up the state law, and to request a private tow at a business, the owner of the establishment must be present. A manager is not good enough. Since they probably don't even know who owns that particular place, obviously, that didn't happen. Got my car back, no charge.

23.

Got back stage to Guns and Roses by photocopying a pic of their album and printed "access all areas", put it through a laminator with a tag and walked right in, did the same for Soundgarden ,got through to the stage area, past 2 security points but got caught, lol, the guys were in shock with the boldness.

24.

My math teacher in seventh grade told us if we put “toaster” as an answer anywhere in our work, she would count it right. She said it so quietly that only a few people could hear. I had forgotten about it until finals that year and I had no idea what six of the answers were, so I put toaster and she gave me full credit for all six. She wrote that she had never graded one where someone put that

25.

For appointments that cost money to cancel with less than 24hrs notice, they often are free to reschedule within that window, so you reschedule it to a week later, then cancel it a day or two later.

26.

In Sydney, Australia, we have the Opal card system for public transport. You load up the card with monies, and tap it when you get on and off public transport. Now these days, per week you get a discount on all your trips after your 8th. Well. That was brought in after people exploited the previous rule. After 8 trips, all trips were free. So people would ride the buses to and from stops, tap tap tapping away, leaving enough time between each tap for it to register as an individual trip, and after a few hours of venturing the city and tapping, they then had the rest of their weekly travel FOR FREE. The news did a piece of everyone doing it, and soon after the new rule came in lmao.

27.

While I was at university, my department at one point switched from requiring students to hand in physical copies of assignments to digital submissions. Apparently a few people on another course had some problems with the procedure on deadline day, so the department sent us a note round saying that to cover for that, anyone who submitted incorrectly on deadline day would have their individual deadline extended by 12 hours. Cue a load of students deliberately submitting unfinished assignments incorrectly so they could get the extra time.

28.

Ex of mine while in a texting argument stated I only wanted sex, and in the next message said I was only nice when i wanted to get laid. So logically I found a loophole, put the two above quotes together and my ex realized that I always want sex therefore I am always nice. Boom goes the dynamite Now we are happily dead to one another

29.

A husband and a wife registering their cars solely in the other’s name that way if they send you a red light camera ticket the name/gender will not match the person driving and you will win a dispute by mailing in a copy of your driver’s license.

30.

Most stores have a policy against returning air mattresses because people often buy them for a weekend and return them when they don't need them anymore. I was one of these people. At the service counter I was told all of this and that they would not refund my money because the box was open. The most they could do is exchange it for a new one, which I did. After a quick 360 at the counter I returned my unopened air mattress and got my money back.

31.

Was at a bar. They ran a $2 shot special for any of the house stuff. I like vodka tonics though. However, those are $6. Me, having taken Algebra twice, I knew $2 is less than $6. I ask the bartender how much she'll charge me for tonic water. She replies, "nothing". I proceed to order a $2 shot of vodka and a free glass of tonic water.

32.

A kid from my high school was about 30 seconds late to class and the teacher refused to mark him “present” and made him go sign in as “late” at the office. In protest, he went and ate a sit down breakfast and showed back up with about 5 minutes left of class with his late slip. Teacher threw a fit that he skipped class, but since he never signed in, he didn’t face any consequences