There is nothing like a good loophole.
If reading detective novels taught you anything as a kid, it was to look for the phrasing and the ways that something could easily be turned on its head.
When you do, and you're right, it's the best feeling on earth.
u/whiter96 asked:
What is the best loophole you have executed? And how did you find it?
Here were some of those stories.
50. Don't It Always Seem To Go That You Don't Know What You've Got Til It's Gone?
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My cousin and I were at Chuck. E. Cheese and we had just finished using up all of our tokens and headed to that one machine that "eats" your tickets. However, once the machine took all our tickets, the paper that came out was pink instead of white. For some reason, this was incredible to our young minds. We went up to the prize counter with our pink paper and showed it to one of the workers. She said it was probably because the machine was almost about to runout of ink. To our surprise though she said that this was a "special ticket" and that we could take any prize we wanted (the amount of tickets didn't matter). I was extremely dumb and got a pink diary when i could've got something so much better. To this day I wish I could travel back in time to change my decision and pick something better. Smh.
49. Rewards Up The Wazoo
Starbucks runs at work. I'm lucky enough that most of my coworkers are too lazy and busy to use rewards apps and I always offer to pick up coffee. I rack up points like no other. Sometimes when they Venmo me they round up.
48. Hundo For Sale
I exploited an oversight in the session programming for an online quiz thing I had to buy for some physics class in undergrad (basically it locked 5% of your grade behind a paywall). Can't remember the exact details, but by having a practice quiz open in another tab I was somehow able to trick the site into allowing me to reset the actual graded quiz (by default you weren't allowed to do that) and get 100% on a next attempt.
47. I Made My Own Bank
I discovered this by accident, I overdrew from my checking account paying for something. The money did not bounce and instead the bank charged me $35 for an overdraft fee.
So from this one time I was really broke I had literally 50 bucks in my account and needed 500. So I went to the ATM and withdrew 500 bucks anyway knowing that I would get my paycheck within a week. And my credit cards were maxed out and could not use them. Not a brilliant hack but only cost me 35 bucks to get 500 bucks.
46. I Tipped Myself
I worked at a busy restaurant that gave 10% off your bill if you had a AAA card (American Auto Assoc.), so whenever somebody would pay their tab in cash and then leave, you would grab the AAA card that one of the servers had, apply the discount, then close out the tab.
If a customer's tab was $50 for example, you would swipe the AAA card, get 10% taken off ($5), then close it out, thus giving you that extra cash on top of what they left as a tip. This was handy whenever they under-tipped or stiffed you, and technically, it wasn't really stealing....
45. I Got Off The Plane
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My ex girlfriend not checking us in for a flight netted us €400 euros each and a night in a hotel.
We were traveling to Gibraltar from London for a few days for just to visit her family. She hadn't checked us in online and they over booked the flight. The airline in question had a policy that if the flight was over a certain distance(3 hours if I remember correctly) then the affected passengers would be given compensation of €400 per person. In addition to this, they put us in an airport hotel for the evening as there was only 1 flight per day to Gibraltar from that airport.
So, it's around 8am, we now have €800 to spend, a night in a hotel and all day and night in London to go enjoy ourselves before coming back to fly the next morning. Best loop hole ever, which the airline closed a few weeks later
44. Hell's Angels
Not that big but when I was around 12-14 my family would drag me and my cousin to biker meet ups/parties. Basically just a lot of friendly bearded dudes and their families enjoying a weekend camping/drinking. We got bored a lot and soon found out that they were taking a 4euro pawn on ever beer glass. And because many people were drunk, a lot of glasses were just never returned and we spend the whole night collecting glasses and pocketing the money, the hosts got annoyed after a while but didn't really care. I think we made around 60euros each that night.
43. The System Ain't Shit
Used to work at a certain grocery store. They had a promotion if you bought a $100 pre-paid visa gift card, you received a coupon $15 off the next purchase. There was not stipulations around it, so i realized i could just use it on another purchase of a visa gift card. I almost emptied the shelf of the gift cards gaining an extra 15 on each one. Ended up getting like $200 at the end of it and spent it all on food and gas. No regrets.
42. Take The Tip!!
Just yesterday I discovered that Aliexpress doesn't check wether you already have an account by address, phone number or name. They currently give $4 off every purchase from a new account, so I wondered if I could just use another email to make a new account and get another $4 off, and it actually works. Even with the same bank account, all details the same.
41. Hundreds Kept On Comin'
Not me but a friend. So my friend's family was sturdy financially, so what he would do is get a hundred dollar bill and give it to his mom to store for him. Once his mom put it away he would go and get it. once his mom would attempt to get it she thought she had lost it and would give him $100 is replacement, so it was like he was duplicating his money.
40. We Hacked Overboard
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In high school, we had very strict security on the school computers; so strict, in fact, that we weren't allowed to use the programs necessary for our intro to programming class.
Luckily for us, our teacher told us "any program can be accessed IF you change its name to notepad.exe"
He shouldn't have told us that... We were able to access everything, including the county school database and remote access of any school computer in the county.
39. Extra Money For A Moment
A very long time ago I worked at a large shipping company. We could get extra money by submitting sales leads. If our lead resulted in increased volume, we got a kick back.
I and another co worker found a system that listed every company in the US that had a shipper number with us, who used a competitor's software. This list was nothing but companies that shipped with us, but also shipped with our biggest competitor. We started coming in on weekends, unpaid, just to enter sales leads. That year I got a full snowboarding kit (board, boots, helmet, clothes, and season pass to the local mountain) all with sales lead money.
Unfortunately we were stupid and greedy. If we'd have randomized the file, we'd have been fine, but sales in one state got flooded with these leads and complained that we were wasting their time with bogus leads. We got shut down.
38. Free Moo-sic
When Napster became legal I signed up for it. Then a month or two later I decided I didn't want it anymore and tried to cancel.
The only way to cancel was to call them. Of course, whenever you called, it would ring forever or if there was a connection you would be on hold with nobody ever answering. It was beyond frustrating.
Around that same my bank was issuing temporary internet credit cards. So you had a credit card just not a physical one. You could set the expiration date yourself.
On the Napster site you were able to change the payment type. So i changed it to the temporary credit card which had an expiration date the following month. I never got charged from Napster again.
37. Hip Young People Eating Salads
My college campus had a cafe with Deli and salad bar, the deli sandwiches were way over priced, like 8$ for a standard turkey sandwich. But the salad bar was very reasonable. (Subsidized to promote healthy eating)
So I found that the Salad bar had all the same ingredients as the sandwiches, the meat was just shredded. The Deli would sale slices of bread for $0.25 each, so I would just buy the bread, load up and weigh my "salad" and grab some free mayo and mustard packets, then build my own sandwiches for under 2$. Used that trick for my last two years.
36. The Loophole We All Need
Mushroom gorge in MarioKart!!
If you jump on a mushroom at the start with a boost, you can climb the rock wall and go around the start post. Once you land you can drive through the start and basically you end up completing a lap in 10 seconds.
35. Now I Have Abs, Duh
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Walmart price match. Got a $400 home gym with free delivery for $180, because Academy Sports had it listed at $180. The loophole was that while Walmart had free shipping, Academy only offered $150 shipping and didn't carry it in store. Walmart tried to deny it for BS reasons, but caved when they wouldn't hold up.
34. How To Drink For Free
Vending machine at University all those years ago... worth noting, my little "loophole" ended up breaking the vending machine a couple of times, but it worked more often than not (as long as you accounted for weight and weren't greedy).
Basically, it was one of those vending machines with an arm that would come up, the drink would dispense onto the arm and then a conveyor belt on said arm would send it to a swinging door on the side where you'd get your drink.
So the trick was, when the drink comes to the door, you hold the door shut. The machine was designed to try it a couple of times, and then give up and give you your money back... but the drink is still on the conveyor belt.
So then you use the money you just got back to order another drink, arm does the same thing, gets your new drink, only this time you don't hold the door and when the conveyor belt goes, both the newly bought drink and the previous drink gets dispensed to you - 2 for the price of one!
Trial and error showed that the arm on the machine had a weight limit (because it's never really expecting to lift more than 500ml at a time). If I tried this with 2 500ml bottles of coke, the arm wouldn't rise again with the weight of both and the machine would break (though I still got my money back). You could just about manage with a bottle and a can of drink, but you were safer getting 2 cans.
Good times when you're broke.
33. Seriously Cheating The Honor Code
GameStop used to allow exchanges on used games within a week of purchase for pretty much any reason. Would buy an expensive used game, beat it and exchange for something around the same price. Basically renting but you got to keep the game if you had to keep it longer than a week
Also my Zune's warranty was about to expire, still worked but tossed it in the microwave for a few seconds and exchanged it for a freshie at the same GameStop. My local GS has closed now
32. Embezzle From Corporations Yasss Honey
When you do a warranty exchange on an automotive battery at Wal-Mart, its processed as two transactions: an item return, then an item sale with credit.
During my late teens, i paid many bills with the cash i got from taking that return receipt up front for them to process for cash.
31. Is It Jenna Jameson Or Nah
Well in kahoot; I would always out my name as a fairly well known pornstar. This would mean if the teacher removed my name and said it was inappropriate, that would admit that he or she knows who that pornstar is and therefore watches porn. I figured out the teachers who watched porn or not. Even if the teacher removed my name, my friends will still laugh about it.
30. It Was Losing Too Much Money!
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A bit late but there was a kind of slot machine at a bar where you put in 1€ and you had to press a single button at the right time to double the amount, with every correct hit of the button the machine would go faster and you could double it again on a right press or loose. The trick was to just play the first round over and over 1€ to 2€ stop and start again. Did this a whole evening and made 200€ after that the machine vanished and was never seen again :(
29. Salad-de-salad
Domino's out of Caesar salad. So I pick a tuna salad, remove the tuna and the olives, add croutons and parmezan and buy Caesar sause from the store. I've never been prouder of myself after figuring that out.
28. The Extra $30 Bought Me This GPS
I used to get reimbursed mileage for work. According to Google its 55 miles going down and around on the bridge. In reality I only drove 26 miles taking the ferry. Didn't save any time bc I had to leave early to catch the boat, but I made $30 twice a month going to that office....
27. Rosebud;,;,;,
Sims Bustin Out on GBA: If you have an auction with a data cable between 2 gameboys, you can sell an item to your friend for a ridiculous amount of money, they turn their gameboy off afterwards, you save, now you both have the money.
26. Think Of The Caffeine
The McDonalds near my work has a punch card system where you buy 5 coffees and get the 6th free. The thing is, they check the card at the register, see that it's a free coffee then give you the card back to give to the next window to punch your card. I accidentally learned that if you don't give them the card at the next window they don't check or ask for it. So ... infinite free coffee? Or until I'm ultimately and embarrassingly caught!
25. The Prime For Prime
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Back when it was first introduced, Amazon Prime Student was just free shipping and there was no expiration. I happened to have just started grad school and met the only requirement- a .edu email address. You didn't even have to open a new account, just convert your existing one. A few months later someone at Amazon realized the flaw in this - their best future customers were all going to have free Prime. Amazon quickly changed the program to one year free Prime (now 6 months).
Everyone already enrolled in Prime Student got grandfathered but was also limited to just free shipping. This was 2009 and Prime video and all the other stuff was not that big a deal yet so I didn't really care. A few years pass and Prime Video and all the other stuff starts to become a big deal but my wife had her own Prime account so I just piggybacked off hers and continued to enjoy my free Prime. Apparently most of my fellow Free Prime Students sucked it up and moved to regular paid Prime because sometime in the 2014-2015 time frame my free limited Prime got switched to free regular Prime. I assume it became more cost effective to just lose out on $10 a month than to maintain two classes of Prime.
24. Oooooooh
I signed up to Deliveroo's free trial of plus membership, basically gives you free delivery with every order.
The debit card I used to sign up to the trial had expired ages ago so when it came to the end of the trial and tried to charge me they couldn't get payment... but the I still have the plus membership.
I've currently got lifetime free delivery.
23. Glitched In My Favor
When I was a kid, I had Spiderman 2: Enter Electro for playstation. I played that game all the time but I was like 8 and I wasn't very good at it. Not to mention I didn't speak English and I couldn't follow the tutorials. At one point there's a lizard boss which has a ton of damage resistance. You're meant to kill him by running around the lab while he's chasing you, grabbing a special formula that brings his resistances down, this way you can actually do damage to him. Well I didn't know this and kept trying to punch him to death with his super tankiness for months. At one point the game bugged out and the boss got stuck inside a texture where he couldn't attack me but I could attack him. I spent about 15 minutes punching him and winning. I was the happiest kid ever. I only learned the proper method of doing it years later and facepalmed really hard.
22. Read Capitalism For Filth
So, I worked at this grocery store in high school that was, in a word, a sh*thole; you know, one of those places where, as long as the customer leaves a good review, f*ck everyone and everything else. We disregarded employees, store policies, and even laws on a few occasions to keep people smiling.
Anyhow, Christmas came along, and we were all promised bonuses. Which, of course, was utter sh*t. Managers got 2.3k+ added to their December paychecks, and hourly peons got $10.00 gift certificates . . . to the store . . . that expired on December 25th . . . when we weren't even open.
Naturally, a lot of pissed employees. And who could blame them, the store was essentially using our 'stipend' to pad their own pockets. I was (still am) quite petty, and asked the managers if we were allowed to buy anything with our certificates, and he she clarified that we could get anything but liquor. Told all the employees to buy gift cards to other places (since we sell $10.00 ones by the racks), and the cashier on duty had no choice but to ring us through.
Managed to take a little under $980.00 from a greedy grocery store, and give business to a few other places in town. Woods Co., if any of your managers ever read this, f*ck you and everyone who looks like you! :)
21. Fake Security
For all 4 years I was in college in a major US city, one of the faculty parking lot gates could be opened with any card with a magnetic strip. The lot only fit about 20 cars and was odd shaped as it contoured a hillside. There were 3-4 spots that were never occupied at the very bottom of the lot. I never bought a parking pass.
20. It Keeps Going
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My family gets pizza every Friday. A few months ago, papa John's started taking ~45 minutes to deliver our pizza. So avoid the 3rd time it happened my mom called and asked if we could have a refund because our pizza was cold and made wrong. Papa John's gave us a credit on our account.
Next week we used the credit, pizza showed up 45 minutes later. We called and got a refund, papa John's put a credit on the account.
I think we've had 6 free pizzas in a row now.
19. Smart Smart Smart
I discovered that on a journey of 30 rail stations, they only checked your ticket when you enter and when you leave.
So instead of buying a ticket for all 30 stations, I bought a ticket for the start station to the next station, and from one before the last station to the last station. 2 journeys of 1 station each.
One tenth the price.
18. No More Two For Ones
Not really a loophole,but... back in the late 90's early 2000's when the self service lottery machines first came out if you bought the 'longer' scratch-offs, like the $10 ones, when you grabbed the ticket you would still have to tear it off the next one. If you could get a decent grip you could grab the very bottom of the next ticket and pull it out too! Now the machines just drop the single ticket so I guess they wised up.
17. Being Creative
If I draw really well during my classes my teachers won't care about me not doing my work. I have this teacher in Senior Seminar who got mad at me for taking a 3 minute break (since the class was about an hour and a half long). Anyhoo, she didn't get upset over the kid sitting next to me who took apart his computer and put it back together. Lately, I've been drawing Freddie Mercury and trying to do it realistically, she hasn't said a word and neither have other teachers.
16. Protection Or Just Anger
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This loophole angered me so much.
The situation: I worked for a man who traveled so frequently that half my job was handling his itinerary and ticket purchases. Unfortunately, the previous person in my position had left without letting us know the password to get in to his account for one of the airlines, and IT had deleted her email, which was linked to the account. This airline charged an additional fee if you called them to make reservations rather than use the website.
I called the airline to update the login password. I was told that only the person named on the account could do that. Of course, said person was currently on a flight, and, frankly, too important to make such a minor call. I explained the situation, but no matter what I said, I was told no, it was for the account holder's protection, no one else could change the password.
So I asked her if she could change the email address. Yes, she could, and five minutes later, I was in his account.
15. Bunga Gone
On the Teenage Mutant Hero (Ninja) Turtles arcade machine when I was a kid, if you pressed start after inserting a credit it said 'Cowabunga', but if you hammered start really fast it went 'Cowacowacowacowacowacowacowacowacowacowacowa' as long as you hammer it and get free credits for each press.
Can't remember how I figured it out but I was very happy.
14. Free Lunch
I'm a truck driver and stop every day at the same place. There's a McDonald's next door. On the receipt was a link to fill out a survey. If you filled it out and wrote down a number on the receipt you could turn it in for a free Mcdouble or a medium fries.
So I made two separate orders and got two receipts. Filled out two surveys that took 15 seconds each.
The next day I used the receipts to place two separate orders for one free Mcdouble and one free fries to see if my suspicions were accurate. I got two receipts and indeed, the survey link was printed on each receipt. I ate free lunch for 2 months before I started intermittent fasting.
13. Looking Important
When I was in the Navy, I got stationed at a huge shipyard with very little oversight. I walked around with a form laden clipboard for an entire work week, looking at random objects and writing on my clipboard.
When questioned, I would look at the person's name tag and ask their supervisor's name, then write on my clipboard.
I eventually stopped and started actually doing my job due to boredom.
No one caught on or tried to stop me. Clipboard+scowl=immunity.
12. The Robin Hood Of The Modern Age
In high school I worked as a cashier at a major grocery store chain. Our store offered a loyalty card that accrued points for discounted gas. Every $100 spent = 10 cents off per gallon at the store's gas pump. Many customers would come in who didn't have/want a store card.
I filled out an application for a store card with fake info and a dummy phone number and used it on any customer without a card. This resulted in them not missing out on store deals and me pretty much never having to pay for gas throughout most of high school.
11. Such A Bop
Not really a loophole, but back in junior high, my school took a poll, asking what our favorite song was, and would put the results in that year's yearbook. Naturally, me and all my friends wrote down, "Wii Sports Theme". It was a simple google form, and me and my friends were the only ones who realized you could submit a form more than once. So we submitted thousands of entries saying "Wii Sports Theme", and saw the song in the #1 spot in our yearbook at the end of the school year.
10. I Wonder What The Code Was....
In 2006, me and a friend were in an intro to programming class in high school. Our teacher told us about this Microsoft programming contest for high schoolers, so we decided to enter. They had the goal for what you were supposed to do, an example, and the code they used for that example.
We realized that the rules didn't say it had to be original code, just that whatever we submitted would belong to Microsoft. So we took their code, tweaked a few lines to make it work for the test scenario, and submitted it. We ended up tying for second, which was good enough to win us each a pocket PC.
9. Perfect Defense
I was maybe 4 or 5. Mom and dad are having a party, all adults over. I'm told to not go into the living room to bother anyone unless there's an emergency, but I can go into the kitchen/get drinks/etc.
So the party's been going on a while, I go to the kitchen to get myself a glass of water. (There's a stool so I can do this for myself easy enough). While in there, I notice a plate of freshly iced sugar cookies. A whole plateful. I love sugar cookies and I love icing. I wonder if I can have one.
Then I reason, it's not an emergency, so I can't ask, so might as well take the whole plate.
Mom came to find me later furious (with Dad on her heels). She asks me what I was thinking of, taking the whole plate of cookies. I said "I wanted to ask, but you said only ask in case of emergencies."
Dad started cackling. Mom deflated, and said "I DID say that didn't I."
Didn't get in trouble.
8. My Spite Made It Work
Back in the 80's, 2nd year Fortran programming and the final project was to write a program that would print Roman Numeral equivalent of any number inputted on the command line up to some large number -can't remember what the highest number was that we had to go to but it was quite challenge for the time - pre OOP and all. My program would trip up on a certain number and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why so I just said, f*ck it and buried a direct if statement for that one number deep in one of the subroutines. As luck would have it, my program was the only one that worked and I felt rather smug (and a wee bit guilty) as he congratulated me when he handed them back.
7. Work/Werk/Work
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Had a salary job, contract said "you are paid $X for all hours work as complete compensation. No overtime pay will be granted, you are expected to work as long as it takes to finish your work"
Little did they know, they didn't specify a minimum hour requirement. Being a fast worker, I basically showed up whenever I wanted. The only thing that kept me at work longer than a few hours each day was my supervisor, he was a cool guy so I stuck around with him.
6. None The Wiser
I don't recommend trying this because I was honestly just really lucky but... One semester I had a handful of lab reports due for a class, all on the same due date at midnight. I ended up finishing them all...an hour late at 1 in the morning. I went ahead and submitted them anyway (because why not?), but the next day my professor emailed me back to remind me there was a no late-work accepted policy in the syllabus, work submitted late would receive a zero with no exceptions, etc.
I politely responded with the point that technically a time zone was never specified for the assignments that were due, and that at the point they were submitted there were still places where it would've been considered on time... He ended up accepting them with full credit.
5. A Winter Celebration
I moved to the mountains to snowboard for a year, after a year of aimless university. The student seasons pass was like half the price of the normal pass. So I signed up on the web for a few courses, got the student pass, then dropped the courses before any payment was due. Saved like $700. I actually didn't think they'd honor the price considering the university was in a prairie city ~2000 miles away.
I got over 150 days on that seasons pass.
4. Coding Comes In Handy
I once got a traffic ticket that required me to take online driving school. This involved a lot of tedious clicking, and you couldn't press NEXT until a certain amount of time had elapsed. On the clock at work, I wrote a script to do the thing for me. <sunglasses emoji>
3. I Fought The Law And The Law Did Not Win
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Got pulled over when I was 19. Driving without a license. Got my truck impounded and was accruing daily impound fees. The impound lot couldn't legally release the truck unless the registered owner had a valid state license or permission from the court to release it.
My court date was like 3 weeks away and there was no way I could afford to pay the daily impound fees so I "sold" my truck to my friend who had a valid driver's license. He applied to transfer the title to his name and I turned in the bill of sale and he received a valid registration for the truck in his name. We both went to the impound lot and demanded the release of the truck. They brought it up front, he handed me the keys and I drove it off the lot. Impound people knew they got played but couldn't do anything about it.
He got the title in the mail a couple weeks later and "sold" it back to me. I gave him $50 for his trouble knowing full well he saved me well over $600
2. Never The Luck
When I was in high school a senior came to school with a bikini on. He argued that nowhere in the dress code did it say he couldn't, and the only thing close were "Shorts must be fingertip length" and "Sleeves must be X inches"
As he had neither shorts or sleeves, he technically wasn't breaking any rules. Obviously though, they didn't care. So I guess it's not really a loophole, but an attempt at one.
1. If You Can Avoid Tax, You Can Cheat Death
I worked in the US for a while, and since I didn't understand American taxes, I signed a form to say I'd pay tax on my earnings back home in the UK. Then, when it was time to sort it all out, I discovered the money wasn't taxable in Britain. So I accidentally avoided paying any tax at all!