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Some people are better at figuring out loopholes and shortcuts than others.
Some of those things can be illegal and you should probably avoid them, while others are perfectly okay.
It just really depends, ya know?
But one thing is for certain: most people are going to exploit the heck out of loopholes if they happen to find them.
Let’s see what folks on AskReddit had to say.
1. Cruisin’.
“Was on a cruise ship a few years ago that had a pay-per-minute Internet policy. You’d buy like 200 minutes of wifi access for $100 or whatever crazy price it was. They had a little portal that you went to, to start and stop the timer, and tell you how much time was remaining.
I quickly realized that the timer counted by whole minutes. That is, if I started at 12:00:01, and stopped it at 12:00:58, then it counted as 0 minutes of internet use.
For the entire cruise I took advantage of this. Start the timer, fire up your internet apps like Facebook and Instagram and let your timeline and emails download, or launch a website and let it load. Stop the timer.
Browse your feed and photos and read your website and emails offline, compose posts and replies etc. Start the timer again to send/upload, stop it again within a minute.
I milked those 200 minutes for an entire 3 week cruise and still had 45 minutes left over at the end.”
2. What a deal.
“Moviepass was $10 a month and you could use it to get 1 movie ticket a day.
I lived next door to a Regal, and I went everyday because Regal would give their reward points for every ticket purchased. They didn’t care that Moviepass was paying for the tickets then giving them to me as part of my subscription.
In 8 months I spent $80 on the subscription and saw everything that came out and I racked up enough Regal rewards points for about 50 free popcorns or drinks.
Moviepass went out of business but I still had all the Regal rewards.”
3. Parking wars.
“In college there was a parking garage that charged around $2/hour. I couldn’t get a parking pass but learned the heated garage that charged $2/hour had a $20 fee for a lost ticket.
I would park my car in there for a few weeks at a time and when I had to leave would lose my ticket and be forced to pay the $20 lost ticket fee.
A parking pass was around $500 to park outside and I ended up paying around $300 in lost ticket fees to park in the heated garage.”
4. Free printing!
“When I was at university, the pay-for campus printers all worked on a system where you’d print your documents, release them at the printer, they’d print, then after they’ve finished printing, it would then contact the server to get the cost deducted from your balance.
That final step always took a while and I discovered in my first year that if I cancelled the print job as the final page was rolling out of the printer, it wouldn’t deduct the cost from my balance.
With this method I got free printing for nearly two years before they upgraded the system!”
5. OT.
“We had a situation at my old job (a huge, international company) where we’d work shifts, either 8/10/12 hours. Anything after 8 hours was overtime.
Sometimes we were scheduled for the next shift quite soon after the last one had ended, for example 05:00-12:00 and then 19:00-00:00.
Someone discovered that if there were less than 8 hours between shifts in a 24-hour period, anything after 8 hours total was paid the overtime rate.
We did it for ages and then in the context of some team chat, some twat asked one of the managers whether the above scheduling would still be feasible.
Turned out the management hadn’t even noticed and stopped it immediately. And back to minimum wage we went.”
6. Little bandits.
“When my brothers and I were 6-10 years old we found a crane candy game where you were “guaranteed to win” something.
We found a laser sensor in the area where you pick up your prize. This indicated whether or not something had dropped. So, by holding the flap door open at the bottom the sensor was never triggered so for 25 cents we nearly emptied the machine.
Thanks Red Robin!”
7. Free stuff!
“Early in the smartphone world there was an app that gave you points for watching TV shows and ads that you could turn in for gift cards or discount codes.
The rewards were not great but over time and by waiting for gift card restock you could make out like a bandit. However, the shows they wanted you to watch were not my cup of tea (a lot of prime time shows and reality shows) and I wasn’t home for a lot of them so I thought I was SOL.
Turns out, the app had a grace period where if you had recorded the show on your TV you could still get credit, so I just pirated the shows and set my phone up to “watch” them while I did something else. Then I realized it only listened for about 2 minutes before it gave you credit so I was able to get through the log of shows in about 40 minutes and make a killing.
Because of that app I was able to get a kitchen aid stand mixer, a smoker and a bunch of other stuff because of the gift cards.”
8. Bring on the pizza!
“I bought a card once for $10 that had 16 coupons for a BOGO pizza from Dominos. They were little stickers that you were supposed to pull off and hand in when using them, but they never asked for the stickers.
They also didn’t have an expiration on them. They also didn’t tell anyone it was supposed to be one per order.
We’d order 8 pizzas at a time, used them for two years. Thousands of dollars of free pizza really help when you’re a broke college kid.”
9. A good promo.
“Several years ago AT&T was running a trade-in promotion increasing the value of old iPhones way beyond what they were selling for on eBay/ CL at the time.
This promo thankfully wasn’t bundled to a new phone purchase and could be done on any active line of service with AT&T – so no limits on phone trade-ins.
I ended up buying 31 old iPhone 4s for about $70 each on eBay and trading them all in to AT&T on promotion for $200. Worked out to $6200 in AT&T credits (got myself 2 iPads, a 2 new iPhones at the time, and enough of a credit on my bill I didn’t pay for cell phone service for almost 2 years).
I really miss this type of promotion!!”
10. Thief!
“I remember being young and going to Chuck E. Cheese.
When you were pulling your tickets out, if you found this sweet spot then you could just keep pulling the tickets out.
My mom had a hard time figuring out how I got 10,000 tickets in under an hour.”
11. Smart move.
“Right out of college I worked a job that had a 100% match to any retirement contributions.
I was young, lived rent free with my parents, had no student debt, and could grab OT nearly every week. After some budgeting I figured I could throw 80% of my paycheck into retirement.
I did so for 9 months until my supervisor called me into the office to sign a policy change that limited retirement contributions to 50%. I’d stashed away nearly $35,000 on about a ~$32,000 annual pay.
I had no life for about a year, but d*mn if it didn’t jump start my retirement.”
12. Infinite burgers.
“The local Wendy’s had a survey on the back of their receipt that would get you one free burger of your choice with the purchase of any other “premium” burger.
They also had a special on where the Dave’s classic single, considered a premium burger, was $2.
There was no specification that the free burger had to be “Of equal or lower value”.
The first time I didn’t even make a purchase, just went into the store, found a receipt near the garbage, filled out the survey, got my code, and then ordered their Asiago cheese chicken burger (their most expensive item) with a Dave’s Single. 2 burgers for $2.
Then of course I had a receipt for that purchase, which lead to infinite $2 for 2 burger deals.”
13. Long lunches.
“Not sure if it’s a loophole but I’m currently remoting in from home to work because of COVID.
Since I’m salary I don’t log in or submit a time card. Instead they require all employees (hourly or salary) to log in on Skype so they can track how long you’re online.
Except that they didn’t disable the settings so I have my status remain “Available” for 20 minutes of inactivity so I can take 50 minute lunches and not get docked for it.”
14. Whoa!
“I lived near a casino that would let you get chips using your credit card.
I liked some if the show’s and restaurants there but never gambled. So every time I went I’d charge $5K to my credit card for chips.
Then I’d cash out at a different teller swing by the bank on the way home deposit the money and pay off my credit card. I did this maybe once a week.
Boom $5K of free points / cash back.”
15. Loophole or crime?
“Idk if it was so much a loophole as a crime, but in my defense, I like money
So, it’s 2009, summertime, and a new water park in Florida called Aquatica had opened up. In those days, they had two kinds of lockers; small lockers for $5 and large ones for $10. Both were unlocked by keys, and if you brought back the keys for the large lockers, you’d get $5 back.
Now, another thing you need to know so that there was a river that was basically the opposite of a lazy river. It had jets along the wall that pushed the current of the water to the point that it was difficult for even grown adults to stand in place. This also meant that whatever you put in your pockets, would get pushed out by the current.
So, my cousin and I would use swimming goggles and we’d find the neon orange keys, and we’d stagger which one of us would go turn the keys in and we’d space it out as well to ensure the employees handling the keys wouldn’t recognize us.
We’d go, turn in the keys, get $5 back, and f*ck off for about a half hour before coming back to turn in some more. Between that and the cash we’d find in the river and other pools in the park (sometimes it was just free floating quarters and mother times it was actual bills), we never had to actually pay for anything with our own money.
My dad would give us money each day so we could get this little arm band thing that would let us eat as much as we wanted from any of the three restaurants in the park, but we’d find so much money each day that even after spending that money, we’d still have some left over plus the money that my dad gave us. We weren’t so much having a vacation as we were doing a job that entailed finding money and keys, and turning in the keys for money.
We did this nearly every single day for the entire summer. From 9am to 6pm most days that we were there, sometimes until the park closed around 9pm.
I spent my money on video games and idk what my cousin spent his fortune on but knowing him, it was probably designer clothes
I always love telling this story and I haven’t had the chance to in a long time.”
Those are pretty interesting, don’t you think?
How about you?
Have you ever uncovered any useful loopholes?
If so, please tell us about them in the comments!
