Look, most of us try to be honest and do the right thing the majority of the time, but here’s the truth: business, the government, other people…they’re always looking for ways to take advantage of you and your hard-earned cash.
So maybe people also feel like, if there’s a harmless way to get some of the power back, we should take it.
If you feel that way, here’s how 14 people manage to do just that.
14. Never give up your coupon unless they ask!
Dominoes.
We got a voucher in the post with a code they said “collection only, one use, surrender coupon upon use”.
Used it on their website and it worked for 50% off, carried on using it for 2 years every week, then one day it stopped working.
13. This is so meta.
The playstation had a mouse.
A local electronic chain was selling them at clearance for $2 each.
Game Stop was giving $15 or $10 cash for each.
I cleared out one store, got cash for them all, then cleared out two more and got a bunch of games in trade.
12. But you could have actually…tried?
Our English department in high school ran every class the same way. We do an in class essay at the beginning of the year to gauge your current writing ability, and every subsequent essay would be compared to that and your grade is 100% based on improvement.
I’d just write a garbage essay the first time then get an A only half-a$$ing everything
11. Don’t fall for the update trick!
When Verizon got rid of unlimited data in like 2011, it triggered the switch to limited when you upgraded your phone.
I transferred my upgrade to my sister’s account (who already switched to limited,) got the phone and put my Sim card in it. Had unlimited until 2015
10. I really hope she didn’t.
A girl in my high school computers class won a $500 scholarship by doing something similar. She bombed the start of the year test and placed a little above average on the final. They gave the scholarship to whoever improved the most, not who did the best.
I didn’t know her well enough to know if she did it on purpose.
9. Ahhh, high school.
We were the first senior class to be given laptops in high school. It came with some monitoring application that allowed teachers to see when we were using our laptops, watch our screens, etc. We didn’t have the rights to disable it or kill the service but it took a buddy of mine in our programming class about a week to write a little program that would do it anyway.
Click a button and it kills the service. Click it again and the service restarts. This was even better than not being monitored at all because it gave teachers a false sense of security.
We could turn it on when attendance was being taken and then turn it off when test time came so we could Google all the answers. Also spent a lot of time chatting, playing alpha Minecraft, etc. when we were supposed to be taking notes in class. Basically just did whatever we wanted that year lol. Good times
8. That’s a good day right there.
I once bought a snickers and it knocked the bag of Doritos that was sitting against the glass down and i got both.
That’s it. I won life.
Game over.
7. Kids will make time to subvert the system.
In my school we got some of the first computers too and man did they try to shut those things down so we couldn’t sue them for anything but education.
However, that’s how I found the gems of portable flash-drive Minecraft and Halo. We made 4 versions of Halo CE and 2 of Minecraft, and even when they banned one, we still had the others to fallback on.
The kids in our school distributed flash-drives with the games on them and everyone downloaded them to their disks.
We had LAN games during breaks and classes and built some pretty awesome servers and custom Halo modes. We’d be playing it during class and as soon as the teacher came around everyone minimized the tab and we consecutively agreed to stop playing until the teacher had sat back down so no one would die during the ‘inspection’.
I even found a way to watch the educational version of YouTube, which included Good Mythical Morning, a funny channel I never knew I needed.
Twas the best experience I ever had in high school.
6. But you didn’t earn it, though.
Years ago, I played some little Flash game in my browser and at the end I could submit my score to an online scores list. But I noticed that on submitting the score, the browser redirected to a new address that had my player name and the score as URL parameters.
I copied the address, changed the score parameter to ‘9999999999999’, pasted in the new address, and got my name at the top of the list.
5. You gotta love capitalism.
I did this to pay for my Xbox one X. I actually do stuff like this pretty often, but I usually don’t say anything about it because you never brag about the things you get away with, that’s how you stop getting away with them.
In this case, though, Game Stop was doing a deal where they would give an extra 70% on certain games and one of them was some plants vs. zombies game, they were offering $27/pop for them.
Come to find out, that specific game was on clearance at Walmart and target for $5/each. I went to every store that had stock within a 20 mile radius, then opened the games and traded them in. The first few Game Stops I went to only allowed me to trade in 5 copies at a time. Then only one.
By that time, though, I’d acquired about $250 in credit so I checked trade values on other games and purchased used copies (getting 10% off with pro membership) and re-traded them in at the next Game Stop I went to. Breath of the wild, pretty much any Pokemon game, and Mario Kart 8 were moneymakers, usually in the $15-20 range.
I stopped once I’d made enough to pay for my Scorpio Edition One X, I probably could have made even more, but I didn’t want to push my luck any further. Ended up paying about $70 total for the initial investment, and about 4 hours on my day off going back and forth.
God bless America.
4. It’s no one’s fault but their own.
My local grocery store has a mobile app offer that gives you a 10$ gift card if you spend $50+. It’s supposed to be one time use only… But I’ve used it like, 6-7 times. Because I use the self checkout, I can’t receive the gift card at time of purchase, therefore it doesn’t register to my store card that I’ve used the offer.
I also have a few receipts that customer service never marked off as having the offer redeemed, so I’ve been tempted to go back and try to redeem them again …
3. Quite clever, if you ask me.
In college I studied to be a teacher (it ended up not working out :/). I was taking a class where we learned how to create proper assessments and tests.
As part of the class, the professor would usually have us design test items for one or two questions during like quizzes and stuff. Then she said we’d be doing this for the final exam.
So the questions were all to be multiple choice. The /entire/ class got together and devised a system. The questions you design are all to include a person’s name (Mr. Allen or Mrs. Black). Whatever the first letter of their last name was would correlate with the answer options (A, B, C, D, or E).
We all finished the test in less than 10 minutes and nobody was the wiser when we all got 100%.
2. In case you’re the sort of person who enjoys self torture.
In monopoly, you buy as many houses as you can and never upgrade to hotels. You get to the point where they run out of house pieces so your opponent can’t buy them (all legal within the rules) and they have no options to upgrade.
Sit back and collect that rent yo.
1. This is a wholesome deal.
Back when me and my GF were poor I would go to the local supermarket (Sainsbury’s) at the end of the night when they were reducing food going out of date to a few pence.
Some of the items, at full price, were discounted for buying multiples e.g. £1 each or 2 for £1.50. The way the till worked, it would add £2 to the bill then deduct 50p at the end. Some of the stuff would be reduced to say 20p but if I bought 2 of them (40p) it would still deduct 50p at the end of the bill giving me a 10p profit.
I would buy loads of these and make the bill look reasonable by getting some “luxury” items, which in those days was stuff like coffee. As long as the bill was over a few pounds the tellers didn’t seem to notice.
Then I would go all round town giving the bulk of it to homeless folk and put the rest in the freezer.
TL;DR Sainsbury’s paid me to take food.
I love the small and big ways people get away with it, don’t you?
How do you game a system? Share with us in the comments!
