Sometimes, breaking the rules is fun, and we can’t help but take advantage of a loophole. In this article, we’ve collected the most interesting loopholes people have accidentally found and still use to this day.
Scroll down to find out how you can save hundreds of dollars on food, get free snacks from a vending machine, and even have free car washes!
I worked in a call center during college. Our main performance measure was the number of donations solicited per contact. So if the person didn’t answer or they hung up immediately, it didn’t count against you. I discovered a bug where if I blew into the microphone just as the phone started to ring, it would register in the computer system as a no-answer and dial the next number. I rode this out for several months before I got tired of blowing my microphone for eight hours a day and quit.
In elementary school, we had the Accelerated Reading (AR) program. You would read a book, take a test on the computer, and be awarded points based on how well you did.
At the end of the year, you could buy things at the bookstore with the points you accumulated. The computer was only supposed to allow you to take the test once, but I figured out you could take that specific Harry Potter book unlimited times.
I had just finished reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and got a perfect score on the test. I racked up so many points and was never found out.
At my local movie theater, you could get a small drink for $2.50 or a large drink for $3.50, and a large drink allows you to get unlimited refills.
As another option, you could get a SoBe tea for $2.50. But, they didn’t give you the SoBe bottle because they wanted to avoid any broken glass incidents.
So, they poured the SoBe into the large cup. Boom, I got unlimited large drink refills. I saved several dollars that way.
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. It was 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. So 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.
I coach a high school team. We recently bought airfare with Spirit Airlines to take nine students to a competition. Two of the students canceled about a month out from the trip, and we had to replace them with two different students. Spirit Airlines had a stupid policy: no name changes. You can’t even pay a fee to change the name.
The tickets were basically lost, so I have to buy new tickets. This is where it turned into a nightmare. Spirit’s customer service is overseas, and they plainly don’t care at all about customer service because they don’t actually work for Spirit, but just work in a general call center.
However, I found out that Spirit Airlines DOES allow passengers to correct misspellings. And, these folks don’t really recognize nonsense names. So over four calls, I change the names of the canceled students to the names of the new students, two letters at a time. No one at Spirit customer service made a note because they really didn’t care, and no one ever noticed that the “correct” names during the intermediate steps were nonsense.
My roommate at the time bought a car with his Best Buy bucks. How he did it was amazing. He sent in a ton of self-addressed stamped envelopes to get game pieces. Each game piece had at least $1 of Best Buy money, but some had $3.
There’s a law in Vermont that doesn’t require the sender to provide postage for the return envelope on a SASE. So, he had all his game pieces mailed to a PO box in Vermont, thus saving $0.37 per entry. Then, he had all the game pieces bulk shipped to his home. It was much cheaper than spending $0.37 per entry.
Once he got his game pieces, he peeled all of them, collected his Best Buy bucks, and went around buying MP3 players from stores. Best Buy got wise to this pretty quickly and had a $200 spending limit per day, so he’d travel around the entire metro area, hitting every single Best Buy and spending $200 at each one. Then, he sold them on eBay as new in-box for maybe $10 to $20 off the retail price. I think he made around $10,000. It was a lot of work, but it beats working I guess.
There’s an app called Viggle where you can earn gift cards for watching TV and answering questions. I started using it very early when there were still some bugs. I exploited the heck out of these loopholes.
At my height, I had 10 accounts running at once and made about $250 per day, just from four to five hours in the evenings. All told, I made about $20K from that app. The best part was the questions, but they eventually ran out, and you needed to wait one or two hours until you could answer them again.
Well, if you logged out and logged back in, you could answer them again immediately. Also, the app listened to the audio and detected what show you were watching. C-Span, the tennis channel, and HLM would often have 10- to 12-hour shows. If you checked in once, you were good all day.
This past semester, I needed to take a biology class with a lab to graduate. I was told that it was one of the easiest classes at my school to take. But, as a literature type, I didn’t agree. It was so much information all at once, and I found it really boring, so I didn’t do so well on the tests or assignments.
I got Cs and Ds, even on the final that I stayed up all night to study for. We also had a class blog. There were about 120 of us, and we each had to write three posts per semester on anything biology-related. I didn’t do well in the lab section, either. I failed the multiple-choice test and the practical, and I assumed I was screwed.
However, the professor said that if we made comments on our peers’ blog posts and turned in worksheets to show what edits we made, when, and on what topic, we could get five extra points per edit. Most kids did two or three. I did 97. I ended up with an A for the semester.
Years ago, when online poker was a thing in the US, there were sites that let you look at statistics on other players. They’d give you one free look, but I realized you could just manually change the player’s name in the link and get unlimited free statistics from them.
I used it a lot to see if someone was a good player or not before sitting down at tables with $20+ buy-ins.Ranndym
This is the story of how I passed math and graduated from college. So, my university was notoriously awful for its math program. They used MyMathLab, and it was just generally horrible. I was terrible at math anyway. However, you had the option of testing out of classes.
You would go to the testing center, pay five bucks and take a test. So this was my plan. To get math credits, I’d go take the test, find out what I got stuck on, and then work on that type of problem until I understood how to do it. Then, I’d go back and take the test again. I probably took the test eight times in a semester.
Finally, I passed the test and got my math credit out of the way. The next semester, a new rule was implemented that you could only try and test out of a class twice per semester.
At a pool hall with my friends, I noticed a jukebox. This jukebox had tens of thousands of preloaded mp3s for people to take their pick. Late Saturday night was the pool tournament, and the place was packed. I realized you could download an app for your smartphone and sync up with the jukebox, pay with a credit card and choose music on your phone.
In the app, I found that with every “new” account made, you would get a free song of your choice to play. I made several throwaway accounts and played “Spongebob’s Campfire Song” and “Best Day Ever” on repeat. I almost forgot the grande finale, which was “Raining Blood,” followed by “Through the Fire and the Flames.” I never told a soul until now.
When my friends and I were in the sixth grade, we were always looking for a hustle. We would collect our parents’ empty soda cans to return to the Safeway near us for a few bucks to buy candy.
One day, they installed these big machines that automated the process, so the employees didn’t have to manually count the cans. You would put your can in the machine through a wide tube, it would roll the can around until it read the barcode, drop the can into a locked storage bin inside, and you would repeat this until all of your cans were tallied.
It would then print a receipt that you would exchange for the cash amount of your cans at the register inside. My friends and I tied a can to the end of a stick, got the machine to read the barcode, and then pulled the stick out before the mechanism would force our can-on-a-stick into its belly.
We did this once a week and got about 20 bucks each time before we would get nervous and stop so we wouldn’t get caught.
There used to be an electronics store called Hastings, where I grew up, that sold both new and used electronics.
They had a deal that if you traded in three used games of a common type, such as all PS2 games, you could get a brand new game for free, no strings attached. They were just free, as long as it was any game of that system.
So, I would go into the store to buy three incredibly cheap used games, such as Bass Pro Hunting or whatever it was called, for $5. They had dozens of them.
Then, I’d just walk out, double back, and then trade those in for a $60 brand-new game. I did this constantly for a few months while being harassed by the managers there until they stopped the promotion.
Back in college, we found a loophole with coupons at Kroger for General Mills cereal. If you bought four boxes of cereal, each box was a dollar. But, if you did the self-checkout, you would be printed out a coupon for four dollars off your next purchase.
We soon went mad with power. We used the loophole to buy about 300 boxes of cereal. We only spent 12 dollars on all of it. We would’ve spent less, but we had to go to another Kroger once the manager got wind of us.
We kept around 20 boxes for ourselves and donated the rest to the local food bank. They were so excited when we showed up with three vehicles full of cereal. It was totally worth the 12 dollars and all the time it took.
Back when Vista and Office 2007 launched, Microsoft did an online event where you watched some dull-as-dishwater presentations by their evangelists.
For each product, there was a simple two-question/answer quiz at the end that if you got correct and put in your response quickly enough, you got a free, shrink-wrapped copy of the Ultimate version of Vista and the Professional version of Office.
It was implied in the blurb that you could only win one or the other, but I knew just how to game the system. It turned out there was no mechanism in the system or rule in the terms and conditions that prevented you from entering both competitions. So, I did win both, and so did many others. I got a free copy of Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 Pro.
By accident, I found a gumball machine that, if you turned the dial really slowly, it would drop the gumball. Then, you could dial it back just enough so the next gumball would drop into the tumbler bits, then slowly dial forward again until another drops, and so on.
I got about 20 of them and stopped when I realized that I really didn’t want to chew that much cheap gum
My college didn’t put any dates on our Student IDs. There was no graduation year, no expiration date, nothing. As a result, I kept using it to get student discounts for YEARS after I graduated, mostly the 15% off J. Crew discount.
I was in a trivia bowl type of competition in college. As soon as the announcer began asking the question, you could buzz in and answer. If you got the question wrong, you lost no points, and the question was skipped.
My team answered the first question correctly and proceeded to mash the buzzer for the rest of the round, effectively blocking out all the other questions. We won the round with a final score of one point.
When vending machines first started accepting credit cards, you could swipe your card, select a drink, and when the little drink pod started moving to collect your drink, you could cancel.
The cancel button would stop the card transaction, but not the machine, so you could get free drinks. It was a sad day when it stopped working.
My son attends speech and occupational therapy every week. Usually, it is a $35 copay for each therapy, but if I do them on the same day I only have to pay the copay once. Saves me about $140 a month!
I used to play a lot of Backgammon on Yahoo Games, and some people were real jerks when losing. Most commonly, they’d stall the game by taking a maximum of five minutes per move, hoping I’d resign.
I learned a brilliant way to deal with them. To boot these people off Yahoo for as long as I wanted, I’d try to log into their account. When I used the wrong password 10 times, the account was locked for 24 hours. They couldn’t log in again until I chose to allow it. Scrappy_Larue
I worked at a sandwich shop when I was a young lass. We were allowed one free sandwich for the entirety of our employment there. Being an endless pit of hunger that 16-year-olds are, I was determined to get as many free sandwiches as possible.
If someone called in a phone order and never picked it up, the sandwich was fair game for employees after an hour. So, I would text my friends to call in the sandwich I wanted and then have them never pick it up. I got free sandwiches every day. It was amazing. If I didn’t eat it, I would bring it to school the next day and sell it.
A long, long time ago, Hostess chips, which were the major brand in Canada at the time, had a Mario Brothers promo. You got a “bingo” card in each bag of chips, and every card was a winner. You had to scratch three of nine areas, and if you matched the icons, you won. Then one of my friends figured out the key to the whole thing. He found out that if you used a tin can with a tiny hole punched in the bottom and then dropped down it onto a 100W light bulb, you could see through the card and find the winning spots to scratch. This spread around town, and a week later, there wasn’t a single bag of chips to be found anywhere. They were sold out all over town. We all had garbage bags of open chips around. I won one grand prize, which was a Super Mario Bros game.
My university was trying to encourage people to walk more, so if we downloaded a specific health tracker that’s connected to our account, it would convert steps into points. The points would get you stuff like free coffee, mugs, discounts for stuff, and the most expensive prize: a university hoodie that cost about $30.
Now, the health tracking app is pretty basic, and it won’t let you log your steps manually. However, it does let you connect with other health apps. So I found a health app that would let me add in the steps. I logged an equivalent of 30 miles (50km) a day. In a few days of logging manually, I would get myself a hoodie or two, and I didn’t get caught.
I told my friend about it, and he really perfected the method of getting more steps a day, because, apparently, there was a hidden physical limit to how far a person can walk in a day. But, he managed to trick it by setting his height to be one centimeter. The shorter you are, the more steps you need to take to cover the same distance. In the end, he claimed more than 10 hoodies and he would just get them for anyone who asked.
The university found it suspicious, so he received an email telling him that the activity had to stop unless he could provide evidence that he walked that much. Another friend had a different method. See, you get points just by being friends with them on the university health website. He also found that he could access a list of everyone who had an account on that website. So, he made a python script that would automatically send a request to everyone, earning him points without walking at all.
There are these three Dunkin’ Donuts locations in my area that let you buy “Coffee Cards.” Basically, you pay $200 for the card and can come through any part of the day, however much you want a day, and get any size coffee for a year.
Well, my mom bought one last year and it had expired. She bought another one this year and it looks EXACTLY THE SAME as the old one. They took no effort into changing the card at all, so my mom gave me her old one and I get free coffee whenever I want now. They’re not scannable cards or gift cards. It’s literally just a pink piece of paper in the shape of a card that has the Dunkin Donuts label on it and the locations where it’s valid and a manager’s signature. It does have the date it “expires” on there, in really small print, but they have never once checked my card. They only ask me to “flash” it at them, so I guess the day they ask to inspect it the jig is up.
I wanted to get cheap coffee filters online as I knew I was going to need them for the foreseeable future and wanted to get a better price on them. So, I found a site that had them at half price, which came out to $1.95 for 100 filters, while they’re usually $3.99 at the store.
When I went to check out, it asked me if I wanted to set up an automatic delivery to have them shipped every two weeks, and they would reduce the price. I thought, “Why not?” After all, they were the cheapest I had found, and getting them every week would mean I didn’t have to keep ordering them. So, it brought the price down to about a dollar for 100 filters. I was thrilled. Then, it asked me if I wanted to join the Coffee Savers program for more discounts!
Again, why wouldn’t I? But even I couldn’t have predicted the next development. After joining the saver’s program, it brought the price down to $0.00. I was stunned. I still had to add my credit card, but I was never charged. So for two years, I got 100 filters delivered to my door for free. I never got charged even once.
One day, though, I got a notice that said they were going out of business and my free filters would end. I was sad. But, the stockpile I amassed lasted me for about two years. Recently, I had to buy new filters. Life will never be the same.
The grocery store near where I lived had a fuel card you could sign up for. If you bought certain items, you would get $0.01 or $0.02 off per gallon, sometimes more, depending on the item or week. I should do this. So, I count out 157 little individual packets of drink mix of all kinds of flavors and go to the checkout. I tried to save the guy some time by telling him how many there are in each flavor, but the manager had walked by and stopped to see what was going on with the generic KoolAid.So, the poor guy has to scan every single one. The manager makes an awkward joke about the amount of drink mix I’m buying, but when I pull out my fuel card, my ploy becomes clear. The cashier reads off my new fuel discount, and I’m on my way to the gas station, where I proudly fuel up my vehicle. I still had to pay $0.16 since they wouldn’t let me reduce the price all the way to zero. And then came the twist. I took all the generic drink mix and donated it to the local food pantry because I hate KoolAid.
One week, they ran a promotion that every one of their store generics would get $0.02 off per gallon, per item. I walk by the powdered KoolAid packets and notice they sell a generic version of that at a rate of 10 for a dollar. I do the math. My vehicle has a 16.5 gallon tank, so I will need 157 packets of drink mix to get free gas. This will save me $36.11.
I used to travel for work. I lived in Greensboro, NC, and worked in Boston. I’d book the same flights every week, out early Monday morning and back on the 5:30 PM flight on Friday night. But the thing is, I knew ahead of time that my return flight would be overbooked.
In fact, it was usually so overbooked that they needed as many as six or seven seats. So, they offered money/miles/flights as needed. Every Friday, I’d wait for them to make the first announcement. It would usually be a voucher, which I’d scoff at. Then, the second announcement, with probably a slightly larger voucher.
I’d double the scoff. But, the third announcement…then came my time to shine. That’s when they started offering the good stuff. I’d take that one, which was usually at least a round-trip anywhere in the continental US.
Sometimes, they offered a flight and a voucher, and once or twice they even offered a free trip anywhere in the world! Then, they’d book me a guaranteed seat on the next flight, which was never overbooked anyway.
And that’s not even the best part. The best part was that I got on the same connecting flight as I would have if I had been on the 5:30 PM flight out of Boston. I didn’t do it that way to scam them. It was just the only connection available for either flight.
I took that route 45 to 50 weeks a year for two whole years, and I lost count of how many vouchers and free round-trip tickets I accumulated. I even got calls from the frequent flier miles rep, telling me that I was “using the system” and that if I persisted, I would have my miles taken away. I figured, what the heck? I earned maybe two free trips a year with miles. That was peanuts compared to what I got by simply taking advantage of their weekly kindness.
Actually, no, by taking advantage of them overbooking every time. They never did take away my miles. It all ended about a month before my Boston job was over. One Friday, the gate agent announced that anyone who wanted a free round trip ticket in return for them giving up their seat should see her at the podium. Then she followed it up with, “But not you, Mr. Tillerman.” OUCH, lady.
Washington state high schools have a program called Running Start. It allows juniors and seniors to attend community college classes for both high school and college credit. I was not enjoying my high school experience. I already knew the material as the Colorado schools I came from were ahead of the Washington state curriculum, and there were a lot of disruptive students that led to half of the teacher’s time being dedicated to discipline.
I was rapidly losing interest, and my grades started to show it. One day, I was called into the guidance office and offered a summer job as a tutor for my peers. I told him how much I hated the classroom environment, and he dusted off a few books, and I started the Running Start program.
The only class I attended at high school was a homeroom, then I’d walk to the bus, grab a coffee, and spend the rest of my day at a community college that was right next to my house. Some classes had only a semi-final and final, so I could freely skip them and sleep or play video games at home. In another class, the teacher had quit, and it became an online course. It paid off for me, big time. I did very well, and by the next year, I didn’t even have to show up to high school.
By the time I graduated, I got an associate’s degree as well. The loophole aspect is that the school hadn’t used the program in many years, and the guidance counselor had no idea what he was doing, as I was supposed to be limited on the number of classes I could take in substitution for high school classes. I got away with a logic course being counted as statistics, a forensic anthropology class as lab science, and took a full college load when I should have only been allowed two classes. Also, my day should have started and ended at the high school.
A few years back, when Activision decided to pull the plug on Guitar Hero, Toys R Us decided to sell all their copies of the game for $10. The guitar/drum set was going for $30. I saw the article online and hit up every single store in my area. They were sold out that afternoon. I sat there, defeated.
I had always wanted the entire set, and I had owned previous copies, but I never wanted to dish out the cash for the entire kit. Then it dawned on me. It was an idea so far-fetched, it could only be genius. I decided to go for a Hail Mary.
So, Best Buy has a price-matching policy. I didn’t even think about it. I shot out towards the nearest store. I walked in and saw all the games and kits were still full price. Come on, it’s Best Buy, there’s no way they were gonna lose out on that profit.
I walked into the game section and asked one of the representatives about the price matching guarantee. The guy looked at me like I was bonkers. I had printed an ad for the sale. I took all the games and a full band kit to the register and asked to see the manager. This tall douchey-looking white guy came up to me with a grin. He told me that the ad was probably fake, and that he was not going to honor their policy.
I didn’t even think about it. I just said, “Okay, call them.” He picked up the phone with a suspicious look, and he got in touch with a local store. He asked about the promotion. He went pale when he heard the voice.
Immediately, there was a look of fury in his gaze. The manager then turned around and could barely mutter the words to the cashier, “Honor the discount.” She just stood there, thinking he was joking. The manager said, “Do it,” and just proceeded to walk away. Even his stride told a story of his anger.
The cashier gave me the discount, and in a cocky tone told me it was still going to be around $50. I then smiled and took out a rewards coupon for $50. They still have to give the items a price, so I could use the coupon. I paid cents for everything and I went home a proud man. I beat the system. A few days later, I met a guy that worked at one of the Best Buy stores. I told him my story. He started to laugh.
It turns out Best Buy sent out a memo to NOT honor the price-matching guarantee unless the competitor had the items in stock. The idiot manager didn’t bother to ask that simple question.
My brother got free parking for pretty much his entire time at university. It was that golden period when the pay parking kiosks were able to accept credit cards, but before they were actually connected. They’d read a card and check it against a locally stored list of banned numbers.
Once a month, the meter maid would download the transactions, process them, and update the blacklist. My brother found that they’d accept those prepaid gift cards if they were backed by Visa or MasterCard, but they couldn’t check the available balance. So, he’d buy one, use the balance up on whatever, then use the card for parking until the end of the month when it’d get processed, found to not have funds, and banned. He’d rinse and repeat. The guy saved probably $2,500 over his degree.
My buddy and I were playing one of those “ball dropping” machines, quite similar to Japanese pachinko games, in a theme park that gave out tickets that were redeemable for prizes like huge teddy bears, stationery, souvenirs, cheap gadgets, and stuff like that.
After about five minutes of playing, we hit the “jackpot bonus.” The machine started going crazy and spat out tickets as if it were having some sort of ticket diarrhea. We tried collecting as much as we could, and it just kept giving out tickets. So we started giving them away to kids who were nearby. This went on for close to an hour, and we were like Santa Clauses, making it rain tickets on many very happy children, parents, and even a few young couples who wanted those big teddy bears.
By the time the machine ran out of tickets, we had almost emptied out the prize booth, and the park attendants didn’t seem to mind at all, seeing how happy all those kids were. It was a really awesome day, and some of the parents came to thank us for making their kids happy, all misty-eyed.
At the end, we didn’t even get to claim a single prize for ourselves that day. It was worth it seeing all those smiles and laughs. The best part was that the park crew seemed like they knew what was going on, but they didn’t care enough to stop it, even though we saw them getting chewed out by their manager for not stopping the machine earlier.
We had a chat with one of them later that day and she said she knew the machine was broken and it shouldn’t have been operating, but they hate that the management tweaks the machines to make winning really hard, and this was the park crew’s way of getting back at them. So, every so often, they would stuff that machine full of tickets and just let it run. Muricabrb
The online community that played Diablo 2 created its own form of currency by trading valuable in-game items for rare rings called SOJs, or Stones of Jordan. For instance, if you wanted that rare +attack power armor, you would buy it for 12 SOJs.
Anyway, I figured out that there was a discrepancy between the worth of an SOJ in-game and its actual monetary worth on eBay. This was the same with magic items but in reverse. I would buy SOJs on eBay for cheap, go in-game, and trade them for rare magic items. Then, I would sell those magic items on eBay for way more than I paid. The results shocked even me. I made enough money to pay for college and other living expenses. Honestly, incredible.
In the 80’s, Chuck E Cheese didn’t shred the tickets you get out of their games and use them to buy toys, candy, etc. My friends and I were biking one day behind a strip mall, practicing our wheelies and jumps. We saw a worker throwing a garbage bag of tickets into the dumpster behind Chuck E Cheese. We grabbed it and then started circling back about once a week. Garbage bags and garbage bags full of tickets.
We were doing so well, one of my friend’s parents got in on it. She would take the minivan behind there and have her kids load up. And this is why tickets are now shredded. I think I still have a huge stockpile of frisbees and stuffed animals in my parent’s attic somewhere.
In college, I bought a pack of coupons for Hungry Howie’s Pizza. It had three coupons for a free pizza, no other requirements, just a completely free pizza. I would call and order my pizza, tell them that I had the coupon for a free pizza, show up, and “forget” to give them the coupon every time.
I always had it on me as a backup, just in case they did ask for it. But, out of the three coupons, they only asked for it once. I kept using them for months until the coupons expired, which I am sure they were looking for. I ended up getting a few dozen free pizzas out of them, which was great for a college student.
I was in Costa Rica at a casino, losing money left and right on blackjack. I left the table and went to find my buddy, turns out he was playing casino poker, the kind where you play against the dealer. I had never been interested in it before, but I was sick of losing at blackjack in Spanish, so I sat down and bet.
I was freaked out the first time it happened because I didn’t think it was legal, but all 5 players at the table would compare the cards in their hands before the dealer turned over his. This way, we knew if we had a shot at winning with a straight or flush, which paid more or should fold. I don’t know if the dealer cared or could not understand English, but we all cleaned up at that table over the course of an hour or so. I walked away with over a grand.
When I was in high school, we had a dress code where the teachers insisted we tuck in our shirts. I (like most of my friends) didn’t like this policy, but apparently, I was the only one to actually read the rulebook.
It said, and I quote: “all shirts and tops must be worn tucked in except for those designed to be worn untucked.” So, for the majority of the last three and a half years of high school, I wore Hawaiian shirts. Whenever a teacher would tell me to tuck in my shirt, I’d pull out the rulebook and quote it to them. Most would just shrug and let me to carry on my way.
Bar in my hometown had a regular special, they would flip a fifty-cent piece, if you guessed correctly the drink was 50 cents, if you guessed incorrectly the drink cost an additional 50 cents. The procedure was for the bartender to flip the coin, catch it in their hand and slap it on the bar.
You’d guess and they would reveal the coin. I discovered that there was a noticeable difference in the sound a 50-cent piece made when slapped down on the bar. Proceeded to order 10+ drinks at a time and would guess perfectly for every drink. Never even felt guilty.
Currently, Citgo has an app that lets you check in to a Citgo gas station 10 times to receive $5 off your next purchase. I work next door to Citgo and check in every couple of hours (there is a 2-hour wait in between check-ins). I save at least $10/week on gas.
Chipotle gives you much more food if you ask them to give you all the fixings separately. I felt bad doing it, but not bad enough not to do it. Brandondorf
Remember 1-800-skypage? No? There was this glitch where, if you dialed that number on a pay phone, then redialled a long-distance number, it would connect the call for free with no time limit. I don’t remember why because this was in the late ’90s, and I’m old now. Also, we once lived for two solid weeks on free Taco Bell by photocopying the “two free items” coupon they send you if you call 1-800-Taco Bell and complained. My bowels still haven’t forgiven me.
Bought a really expensive pair of boots for $350 that were priced wrong for $35. Returned them to the store a week later with no receipt and ended up getting a $350 store credit.
In elementary school, we would individually read books and take an online test on the content. If we got enough questions right, it would give us credit based on the amount of words that were in the book.
I realized early that I could read the short version of classic books that were meant for little kids and would get credited to reading the full novel. By the end of the year, I “read” over 4 million words. Nobody else in the school broke 1 million.
Used to work at Starbucks like 7 years ago, and they used to print these receipts where if you filled out a survey, it would give you a 6-digit code which you could then exchange for a free drink. However, when you gave in the receipt with the code, we would just toss it in the garbage and then give you the free drink.
So over a shift, I would just keep all the survey receipts when people didn’t want them, write random numbers on them, then keep a wallet full of free coffee. Since I already got tons of free drinks, I would give them to homeless people and explain it was good for a free coffee. Probably gave away like 100 free drinks.
I paid three hundred dollars a month to park a really pimped-out van in a heated garage in Boston. If you parked front in, no one could see you.
Found a spot near an electrical outlet and ran a line into the van. Paid for a $10 gym across the street that was open for 24 hours, so I had all the hot showers I wanted. Served at a nearby restaurant so ate most of my meals for free.
Watched tv on my laptop with the free WiFi from the coffee shop above me. Literally lived in downtown Boston for 310 dollars a month while I went to college.
When I was a kid, there was a pay phone down the street that if you put your quarter in made a call but 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. btpn-425
I grew up down the street from universal studios and went there every day after middle school. Eventually, we learned to go into the VIP line for rides that nobody was ever in. When the guy stopped us and asked us for our VIP tickets, we just told them a high-up employee named “Rick” should’ve called it in.
After two seconds on the radio trying to verify, every employee just gave up and let us through. We skipped lines for years with that method, and eventually, ride attendants came to know us and just let us through. It was beautiful.
One day we got bold though, and snuck into the studio area. Guards caught us and asked us who we were with. We told him our fictional “Rick” told us we can be here.
Well, the guards took radio verification way more seriously and managed to get a real Rick on the line. We waited for Rick to show up, knowing we were busted. Rick showed up, turns out he was actually the backlot manager at the time and gave us a strange look.
The security guard asked us if we were with him, and this dude said yes! He took us aside and asked us what we were doing, and we told him we just loved the film and the studio atmosphere.
He loved that two young kids were interested in his job and began taking us all around to the studios, allowing us to sit in on tapings of various shows and so on, giving us a free pass to come back anytime, and also….VIP line access.
I used to live in an apartment across the road from a casino whilst at University. They released an app where if you “check-in” you get points that go towards free food and drinks. Because I was close enough to the casino I could just check-in without going to the casino itself.
Every Saturday I used to get a free burger, fries, and drink and watch sports in the sports bar. They eventually scrapped the app; it was awesome considering I was a broke Uni student.
Because I was a good student and rarely got into trouble, I was allowed to have my own phone extension in my room. So, if I was out past curfew, I’d call home. When my mom answered, I’d say, “It’s for me. I’ve got it.” And she’d think I was up in my room. She never did catch on.
Edit: It was 1976. My mom never knew. I know that because I confessed to it years later. She was very shocked and mad, and she grounded me. But I was forty and had my own house by then. My parents were the early-to-bed and early-to-rise type, and my room was a converted attic two floors up from the rest of the bedrooms.
I often came home after everyone else was asleep because I had a part-time job, so I was used to sneaking in like a ninja. It was a bright yellow Princess phone. And finally, I knew a good thing, so I did not abuse this technique, just a few times when it was absolutely necessary, like the time we hitchhiked to see Peter Frampton.
Was living near & attending our local university. While working full-time in an economy in the midst of a recession, I barely had enough money to pay the bills, let alone eat.
Where I live is very well known for its tourist industry & casinos, so I had quite a few friends who worked in it & would tell me about these MASSIVE employee luncheon cafeterias.
At that time, there were no id cards or lanyards to be scanned or checked, all you needed was to find it & be dressed appropriately to the employer’s dress code. After my friend & I did a dry run on one of those trips, in order for me to find it without getting lost, I would go it alone.
For almost 3 years, I had lunch/ dinner for free, learning the peak service times & the dead zones. Even got along with some of the cafeteria workers and custodial crews.
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.
Obligatory not years, but I can’t believe I got away with it- My mum gave me £20 to buy a big thing of a certain brand of cat food which normally costs £10.99. Now, here’s the thing- when I entered the store, I was given a coupon for £5 off that particular brand of cat food.
The store was ALSO doing £5 off the type of cat food I entered for. I got to the till, and the food was priced at £5.99, I handed over my coupon, and it was scanned so that the food was 0.99p. I couldn’t believe my luck because normally it says “not for use in conjunction with any other offer.” But here’s the real kicker – the lady behind the till gave me ANOTHER COUPON, so you can bet your goddamn life I went round again and left the store with £22.98 worth of cat food for £1.98, with a third coupon in my hand. The only reason I didn’t keep exploiting the loophole was because I had to carry it all home on my BMX.
Not years, but when I was broke and had just relocated to a new city, I couldn’t afford WiFi for a few months. The first weekend I was laying around my apartment playing on my phone, and I noticed there was a WiFi network in range that was named ‘Gandalf.’
Well, I attempted to join and after being asked for the WPA, without hesitation I plugged in ‘youshallnotpass’ and was surfin’ the web for free for the next few months.
Part-time retail worker for a big chain. Work gives employees a 5% discount over all purchases, increasing to 10% on store products. Gift cards are store products. So are vegetables and a lot of groceries. By paying $45 on a $50 gift card and then using said card for my shopping, I can purchase $55.55 in groceries, for an effective 19% discount on almost all my essential shopping (and 14.5% on everything else).
I have on occasion bought a card online on my phone while queueing at the checkout. Four years strong and still wondering when they’ll realise they’re giving me a discount on money.
At my current apartment complex, they just changed the laundry machines so you need to use this super slow app. I found out that 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. App name is similar to smallGS or smallPayments.
Bank of America would give you 3% cash back points on gas purchases. Back when I did this, I was a heavy smoker and realized by coincidence that if I paid for gas inside and made other purchases, that I would still get 3%. So buying like $1 of gas and cartons upon cartons of cigarettes became my thing. Now I don’t smoke anymore though, which is even better savings.
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……
About 10yrs ago American Eagle distributed $10 off $10 purchase coupons on my campus. No restrictions. I asked nicely, and one of the reps gave me a STACK of them. Guess how much socks and underwear were? $10.50.
It was years before I ever paid more than .50 for a pair of either. Sunglasses were like $2. Flip flops. The accessories world was mine for the flaunting. Never saw that deal again.
When we had a daily limit of one hour on our AOL account, my sister figured out that if you unplugged the phone line during your session and logged back in, it reset your hour.
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.
Circa Late 80s. You could make a long-distance collect call from a pay phone and charge it to a private number. The operator would call the other number to confirm. We’d ask the operator to call the number of another pay phone nearby and have a friend authorize the call. Free long distance for almost a year.
Got keys to a new flat on a Friday afternoon, the place had electric but it wasn’t in my name. Went to the electric company just before closing and the lady said, “Flat 8 you say……. Hummm we only have record of 7 flats on that building. Tell you what (glances at the clock), come back Monday with the serial number on your meter, and we’ll get you all hooked up” I never went back and enjoyed free electric for over 2 years until I moved out.
Local casino issued a $20 free play coupon in the newspaper with no expiration date. I talked to the newspaper delivery guy and asked him about that copy and he told me he’s got 100’s of them in the van as they were a few days old now.
I got all of them, clipped out the coupons, and proceeded to make $19.50 every day after work for around 500 or so days. Not quite years, but pretty damn close. The casino never printed a coupon without expiration/one per customer rules ever since. OlmecDonald
Staples used to let you recycle an infinite amount of ink cartridges at $2 a pop. My old job used to run through ink cartridges at an insane rate, and it happened to be my duty to recycle them.
I brought them to Staples and recycled them under my Staples rewards account to what amounted to 1000s of dollars over time. If there wasn’t something in the store I wanted to buy with the coupons, I could buy from their online store, which had video games, TVs, and other nonoffice items.
If I still didn’t see something I wanted, I could buy a Visa giftcard or giftcard to another store via their website to translate the money into direct cash. Staples eventually put a 10-cartridge per-month cap on recycling which ended my madness. All technically legal, mind you.
This is super weird, and I haven’t thought about it in years, but I suppose it was a loophole… Soda companies used to run giveaways where they would put a code under the cap, and then you could enter the codes for points and get free stuff once you had banked enough points.
I was a stock boy at a local grocery store, and we had to take care of the bottle return machines also. Any loose caps (and nasty soda juices) would settle in the bottoms of the bags, so on slow nights, we would cut the corner of the bags to drain and collect any loose caps, which I would then wash in the mop sink and take home to bank the codes.
I ended up getting some sweet stuff like a few CDs, a zip-up sweatshirt, and even some decent noise-canceling headphones, lol.
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.
In high school, our p.e. grade was based on improvement. We took a skills test at the beginning and another at the end, and your grade was based on how much you improved. So, once I learned that I always sucked at the first test and then did miraculously better at the second, so I had a massive “improvement” and thus, a better grade. BarnabyMoose
My Aunt and Uncle were trash collectors both professionally and as a hobby. My mom had pulled one of her epic screw-ups (again), and we ended up living with them. Most of our food came from the trash.
However, Dominoes had a rewards system where the boxes had blue or red tabs depending on the size of the pizza. Collect enough tabs, get free pizzas. Aunt and uncle collected thousands of those tabs. We ate pizza every weekend for months before the company caught on, and they put an end to it. I was 11 at the time, but I remember hearing that their address was banned for life from delivery.
I’m pretty sure Dominoes also stopped the promotion shortly thereafter… It was awesome while it lasted.
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.[deleted]
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.
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.
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.JFVarlet
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.
Here’s the one that saved me $100. For some 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.
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.
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 $40.
The promotion at Subway was you would get a free 6-inch sub if you bought a 25$ gift card. Then you buy another gift card with your 25$ gift card and get another sub. You could do that to infinity the year after they changed it, so you cant buy gift cards with gift cards.
In Sydney, Australia, we have the Opal card system for public transport. You load up the card with money 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.
A guy from Russia, if I remember right, scanned a credit card agreement offer he received, 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!!!altron138
I lived down the street from a rare bookstore that didn’t have a website. I would go in, take pictures of really expensive books, list them on eBay with a reserve of the cost of the book +$50 sometimes, they would sell for $500 to $1000 over the price of the book. Divotus
Clipped ALL the Sunday “5 dollar off” coupons for the restaurant I waited tables at, every time someone paid cash, I got an extra 5 dollar tip. I made way too much money doing that.
In my high school lunchroom, fries were 89 cents. No matter how many you got. I discovered that I could put OTHER food, such as pizza and cheese sticks, on my tray and then bury it in fries and only be charged 89 cents. I was a fat kid.
I knew a guy in college who would use his food stamps to buy expensive milk with a deposit on the glass bottle it came in. He would pour the milk down the drain in the parking lot and return the glass bottles for cash.
When I was in college (05-09), I would email blank documents, or documents full of symbols, to professors to make them look like they were corrupted. I would usually get several days extra time to do it. You couldn’t do it all the time, but at least once per professor. TheAman44
Figured out the soda machines on campus we buggy. Basically, if you try to pay for a can with a meal plan card that did not have sufficient funds, it would reject your card, but on the 4th rejection, the can of soda would come out anyway. ltc_pro
Needless to say, we emptied out quite a few soda machines for a few months before the bug was fixed.
I would go to fresh and easy and get 2 clearance items for $1 each, and they would have a coupon on them where it was buy 2, get $3 off. The system didn’t have a fail-safe for the coupon, so it counted both discounts and gave me back a dollar. Shiol
I use to work at a retail store and noticed that items were labeled vaguely. So whenever someone would approach me and seemed like they were buying gifts for their kids, I would give them ridiculous discounts, or even when the customer was just nice, I would give them discounts.
Whenever I was asked about discounts, I would just state that the items were defective and hence I gave a discount. I did this for a year and didn’t regret helping people out. Plus, I got amazing feedback and helped with getting more hours.
When I was waiting tables around Christmas, we had a gift card special. Buy $25 and get $5 free. So if someone paid in cash for their meal, I would buy a gift card for them and use it to pay for their meal and keep the $5 one.
I then traded the $5 gift card for cash when turning in my shift money. So I would make an extra $20-50 a night. If you see this offer, try to get a job as a waiter there.Footpeter
Went to summer school first three years of high school. I had to complete 1 or 2 semesters’ worth of work for pretty much all the core classes I had. They didn’t turn off the internet, so I just googled everything. Me_Tarzan_You_Gains
I sat in the back corner so they couldn’t see I was looking all the answers up online. I ended up completing 6-8 semesters worth of school in about a week, multiple summers in a row. Now I teach algebra, geometry, and trig to all the new guys at my blue-collar job.
Instead of ordering a Big Mac, you can order 2 single burgers with the Big Mac sauce. Stack them, and you have a Big Mac for a dollar less! Saved me much over the years.
When you’re under 17, you can return any item to a store even after the return date because of the fact that minors can’t be legally bound by contract (and yes, buying something from a store is a form of contract).
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At McDonald’s, ordering two 4-piece McNuggets costs less than ordering one 6-piece. Also, instead of getting a 20-piece McNuggets with three dipping sauces, you can get 5 of the 4-piece for $1 each and get 5 dipping sauces instead.
I worked at Macy’s selling women’s shoes. Worst job ever. Macy’s paid commission in sales of shoes, but if it was returned, they deducted your sale.
They wouldn’t, on the other hand, deduct it for damaged products, so for every customer returning shoes, I would refund them but put it as damaged and promptly head back to storage and proceed to destroy the shoes. Money in the bank.koolaid_chemist
My local ski resort did student season passes for only $299 versus the normal price of like $700 so when I wasn’t in school I’d just pull up an old online schedule, change the dates, and print it as proof of my enrollment.
They accepted it three times. Then I started charging ski bums without internet/computers to have me do the same for them, too.
One time, at a local pizza place, the “play until you win” claw machine malfunctioned, and never realized we had won. We emptied that thing.
I have a pair of headphones, and they have a 1-year warranty on them. If they break, I get a new pair, and the warranty is reset. But they don’t have great build quality (though they sound ok), so they hardly last 6 months. I’ve had these headphones for around 2 years now, replacing them every time they’re broken for free. Only cost me £20, to begin with.
When I go to the movie theatre, I use the self-checkout line to avoid the long lines. I always select a Senior Citizen ticket and receive a few dollars off the cost of admission. The ticket taker never checks to see what type of ticket I purchase, so take that movie theater.
At my job, you can take the day off for a funeral, no point, no pay. All you have to do is bring in a clipping from the paper and a card from the parlor.
I’ve done this about a dozen times. None of the funerals were for people I knew.
In my college dorm, we had a vending machine in our lobby that would give out two drinks instead of one if you just barely pressed the button without fail. The amount of free drinks my friends and I got was ridiculous.
I once got a coupon for one free Nesquick item that cost less than five dollars. So being a poor college sophomore, I duplicated the coupon bar code and made a bunch. I would go to my local stop-and-shop and check out at the self-service register. Between me and my 3 roommates, we got about 32 gallons of chocolate milk for free. ybny23
When Candy Crush was super popular, discovered that once you lost all your lives and had to wait however long until you could play again, you could just manually change your clock in your phone forward that amount of time and start playing again.
My brother got arrested. The cop decided to drive to one of those automated car washes while my brother was still in the car. He watched the officer type a code Into the keypad and memorized it. We had free car washes for a good two months.
When my dad was in college, he had a professor that told the class at the beginning of the semester, “I will know each of your names by the end of the year. If I get it wrong, I’ll give you 10 extra points on the final.” All semester he got my dad’s name wrong, and he never corrected him until the day of the final. The 10 extra points pulled his grade up to an A.
The McDonald’s near me had a promo on the receipt where you fill out a quick survey online, it gives you a number, and you can take that receipt back with the number and get a free quarter pounder.
After you use that, you get another receipt, even if you didn’t purchase anything other than the free quarter pounder. After a few tries, I realized they don’t even check the number, so as long as you had something there, you’d get the free food. Unlimited free quarter-pounders.
In high school, I had a typing class, the computer would have a given paragraph at the top of the screen, and you would have to type it as fast and accurate as possible, you couldn’t highlight the passage above with the mouse, but I found that “control A” did highlight it and ctrl V and P still worked.
I would copy and paste the passages. Always getting 100%. The trick was to copy, paste and wait a minute before submitting it, otherwise, you’d get something like 10,000 words per minute with 100% accuracy. TheBaratheon
Retailmenot was giving away $5 gift cards for simply entering your email address. I continued to create a bot that would use multiple email accounts to register this deal and got around $300 of individual $5 gift cards.
The pool table at a local bar required $2 a game to play. I would put the two dollars in the slots and slowly push them in, just enough for the barrier to raise, releasing all of the balls. Once they were all in the open compartment, I would pull the coins back out.
None of the staff ever paid attention, so I was able to play for hours upon hours for free. Needless to say, I have spent many a night working on my game at no cost. I’m still terrible.
Our school had a system whereas a reward for various things you could get into lunch, skipping all the normal queues. There was a little card you got with the dates the pass was valid on and your name.
Then one day, I was given a blank card with no date or name on it and told to get a teacher to fill in the dates. Long story short, I photocopied about 50 of those suckers, and my friends and I never had to wait outside in the cold for lunch for over a year. Good times.
Some guys at my college found out that on the housing website if you hit the back button, you could register for housing early. They all got to choose their preferred dorms as a group. It all backfired, though. The school caught on and accused them all of “hacking” the system, and it was a big deal. I think some of them may have gotten into serious trouble. For an outsider, it was hilarious. I think they even made some video about it.
My cousin and I discovered that if you download the St. Louis Public Library app and made an account, you could track how much you’re reading. Once you read like 500 minutes, you get a free burrito voucher for chipotle. There are 33 public libraries in STL, we got 33 burritos.
In my second year of college, my laptop got wiped, including all of my office programs. I installed a 60-day trial in 2010 and found out that if you change the date on your pc before opening an office program, you can use it indefinitely. I have been using it ever since.
So the country I live in has their own sort of Netflix. Some similar rules apply such as a free 1-month subscription upon making an account. However, unlike Netflix, which needs a credit card number to register, all you need is your email. So I’ve been making a new email every month, registering again. Boom, free streaming.
Worked for a company responsible for a major airline’s booking site. One day said airline posted the wrong fares for many of their international flights. Within an hour of getting into the office, the fares were corrected, and most of our Indian coworkers had booked trips home for $100. dailytoxin
I paid for lunch in college a handful of times. Every other time I simply walked into the entrance, got my food, and then walked back out the entrance. I was extremely poor at that time, and after doing the math, discovered that I would be about 2,000$ short if I bought lunch every day. It wasn’t my proudest moment.
I used to go to Starbucks by my house every day, and I would always get an Iced Coffee. I found out that they had refills for 50¢ if you got it within the same day, but the Starbucks next to my house never gave me a receipt for them to have proof that I came back on the same day.
I became a Starbucks member and got 5 stars in order to get free refills. I was able to get free coffee for a whole month, and I would make money from it when my sister told me to get coffee for her, and after a while, she found out what I was doing but still gave me money because of the college life struggle.
A friend of mine was trying to win a writing competition. There was no limit to the # of votes you could get from a single person, so I wrote a script to auto-vote for him. He won by a landslide and thanked his “Army of voter robots” in his acceptance speech. kmlaser84
At my undergrad university, as long as you took three levels of a foreign language, you could opt out of one of the required classes. It was often used by engineering majors to get out of their English classes, but I was the reverse. Three semesters of German were less stressful than one of math.
There used to be a snack vending machine near me that allowed you to put in a ten-dollar bill, and it would give you your snack, 9 dollars in change, and your ten-dollar bill back. I made over $300 before they caught on. [deleted]
At my school, if you pressed the buttons in the right order, you could enter the menu and change the price of the drinks. 1 cent Cokes for everyone. sikskittlz
