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Oversights by companies typically cause nothing but trouble, but when those common oversights lead to easily-exploited loopholes, it’s hard to complain. There’s something about the nature of hacking a system that makes it feel like the hacker deserves whatever rewards they reap, just by virtue of their cleverness. Figuring out just the right way to put a coin in a machine or providing your own interpretation of a school dress code rule can be a small but delicious victory.
They’ve won pizzas, flights, laptops, and concert tickets – these scamming Reddit users are masters of the loophole. For example, former employees of fast food chains collected unused promo tickets from discarded cups, gathering small amounts of cash and traveling for free. Other scammers have been less subtle, like the man who generated email addresses in bulk. As a result, he received enough coupons to eat free pizza for a year.
Although all good things come to an end, the ego boost that comes from successfully taking advantage of a loophole will always be with you. Now go forth, and win that Wii by printing a bunch of your school’s swag bucks.
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From Redditor /u/BrushgoodDar:
I didn’t find this loophole but my friend did. A few years back, an online store had this promotion where whoever spent the most money over a month would get free round trip airplane tickets to anywhere in the world.
My friend (who’s a… genius) found that one thing you could buy on the site was a gift certificate. So he bought a $25 gift certificate and kept spending it on another $25 gift certificate. So he ended up spending $25 on round trip tickets to Australia.
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From Redditor /u/The_Original_Gronkie:
Years ago you could buy American Express Travellers Checks at AAA for no additional cost. I read about this family that would buy them using credit cards that got travelling points, then turn in the travellers checks and use the money to pay off the credit cards, but the points would stay on their account.
They kept ratcheting up the limit on their cards until they were buying and returning hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of travellers checks every month, and banking millions of points.
They were travelling all over the world until the companies figured it out and stopped it. It was all completely legal, though.
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From Redditor /u/Dulcius_ex:
Some guys I knew in college used to dumpster dive at Wendy’s when they were doing an air miles promo for each drink you purchased. They would grab all the cups they could find and then mail them in. They traveled a bunch of crazy places for free.
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From Redditor /u/operarose:
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.
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From Redditor /u/mahck:
Local radio station had a contest where you call in when they play same artist back to back to win a prize. Turns out they had a “now playing” and “up next” feature on their web site.
My girlfriend at the time would start calling in before the second song even came on. Won tons of prizes ranging from concert tickets to a laptop.
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From Redditor /u/taylor1288:
Not very impressive but at my high school we had to wear a buttondown and a tie to class every day. One of the kids realized that they never specified what kind of buttondown it had to be so he wore a Hawaiian shirt to class with a tie. Technically it met the dress code so it stuck.
Pretty soon most of the school started wearing Hawaiian shirts with ties to class. We looked like a bunch of ridiculous Jimmy-Buffet-goes-Mormon types but it was worth it to spite the system. They changed the rule to ban Hawaiian shirts a week later.
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From Redditor /u/SpidurMun:
My university was trying to encourage people to walk 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 which [cost] about £30.
Now, the health tracking app is pretty basic, it won’t let you log your steps manually however it does let you connect with other health apps. I found a health app that would let me add in the steps and I logged in an equivalent of 50 km a day and in a few days of logging manually, I would get myself a hoodie or two and I didn’t get caught.
However, 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 1 cm and because the shorter you are, the more steps you need to take to cover the same distance.
In the end he claimed about 10+ hoodies and he would just get them for anyone who asks. The uni found it suspicious, so he received an email telling that the activity had to stop unless he could provide evidence that he walked that much.
Another friend had a different method. 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 in that website. So he made a python script that would automatically send a request to everyone, earning him points.
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From Redditor /u/httphaimish:
Italian restaurant my family loves had a candy claw machine we played every time we went. But the trick to learn was, if the claw closed all the way it thought that meant you didn’t get anything, and would let you play til you did get something.
This means we would go for individual items that would fit into the claw perfectly (one sucker, one laffy taffy) so it would close all the way, instead of trying to get a big lot all at once, that way it wouldn’t register the candy and we could keep going and going.
We actually took so long once our parents made us leave before our turn was up and we still left with hand fulls of candy. The best part? IT ONLY COST A QUARTER! They no longer have that machine.
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From Redditor /u/ItsMeMurphYSlaw:
My best friend a few years back figured out our favorite late night pizza place had a deal that if you referred X number of friends to their email loyalty program, you got a code for a free large pizza. Well he was a tech nerd and found a way to auto generate email addresses for fake people and racked up an insane amount of free pizza codes.
Didn’t pay for any pizza for what seemed like a year, but ordered like three times a week and always tipped the delivery driver. Eventually he felt bad and told them there was a problem with their loyalty system. They told him he could order one last time, and when they delivered it the guy told him that this pizza was on the house, but he could never order from them again.
The address was blacklisted. Now a few years passed, and my friend had long moved out but the house stayed in the group of friends. Somebody decided they wanted late night pizza and they call our spot.
Everything is fine until they gave the delivery address and then the clerk tells them they can’t deliver there. The address was in their system and there was no amount of explaining that was going to change their mind. Still blacklisted.
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From Redditor /u/Dean_Soja:
Went to a catholic school with uniforms. We got “jeans day” passes to wear. They were always different colors, including white. I took one white pass, took it to a copier copied enough to fit one page, printed one full page of passes then printed mass stacks of pages. I made a lot of money selling them out.
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From a former Redditor:
A (very) old place of work decided to have a Christmas party, and provide everyone with a few vouchers each for free drinks. They’d arranged with the venue that employees would hand over one tag for any drink of any size, and would settle up in the days after the event.
The problem was that these vouchers were simply tags that you’d put into a filing cabinet sleeve (and write on) with a coloured sticky dot on them.
They distributed the tickets half an hour before we closed for the party.
Guess what was stocked in the stationery cabinet? Filing tags and sticky dots.
They had no idea how the bar bill was nearly £10,000…
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From Redditor /u/Modusobit:
My school had a reward system for good grades/behavior called swag bucks. At the end of each quarter you could trade them in for prizes (movie posters, dollar store toys, I think the biggest prize was a Wii).
They were just a heavy stock red paper with a times new Roman font on them. My mom worked for a printing company at the time and I printed a reem of them. I made a bit of money selling them to other kids.
But shortly after I hatched this genius plan, the school banned them because we were playing poker with the fake money. [A] teacher found out when one very misbehaved student had enough bucks for a Wii and some DVDs after pulling straight Ds.
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From Redditor /u/Pterons:
They used to have a promotion at Wendy’s, probably six or seven years ago, where if you filled a survey out on your receipt you could get [a] free burger.
I guess they didn’t notice that you could take the survey on the receipt of the free burger and just keep getting free ones. So we would just go after school and chain five free burgers after we just bought one.
We did that for a few days until they finally caught on and stopped accepting it.
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From Redditor /u/zephyrcoco:
My friend made a spreadsheet of all the restaurants in town that gave you free stuff for your birthday and mapped out the shortest route to take you to all of them.
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From Redditor /u/hear2fear:
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 ([it was] 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.
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From Redditor /u/Daerkyl:
I can’t remember when it happened, but it was years ago. I think it was Nestea, or some other canned tea, but if you bought a case of tea then there was a coupon on the box for a free case… except it was on every case, so now you have case #2 and another free case coupon. All the tea could be had.
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From Redditor /u/schaumann:
When Presto card first came out in Toronto (the swipe card that gets you onto public transit) the card I got was faulty from the moment I bought it. I’d loaded it with cash but nine times out of 10, it wouldn’t scan. The transit operators would see me curse & swear at it and let me through the gates anyway. Then I’d pick up a transfer which passed as my proof of payment.
I must have done that a good 30 times over the course of two months, saved myself $100 or so on transit. Didn’t want to push my luck too much so eventually replaced the card with a working one.
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From Redditor /u/mstibbs13:
There was a drink machine in college that was $.75 for a juice. If you put a dollar in it gave you 5 quarters in change. I got a juice everyday for months before they finally fixed it.
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From Redditor /u/pjhollow:
My stupid local Papa John’s gave out these promotional $5 for a large pizza little plastic cards at a homecoming my freshman year.
The thing is, this coupon didn’t have an expiration date or use limitation, and since it was plastic no one collected it.
I used that bad boy like once a week for three years until they eventually refused it in my senior year lol.
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From Redditor /u/cld8:
Laws sometimes backfire.
In some states, there are laws that if a teacher’s contract isn’t going to be renewed for the next school year, they are entitled to notice by a certain date. That date is before the school district knows how many teachers they will need.
[No] they just give notice to all the teachers, just to be safe. Then they rescind the notices of the teachers they are keeping, which is usually all of them.
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From Redditor /u/Gerreth_Gobulcoque:
Back in the day, two five-piece chicken nuggets at Burger King cost less than a single eight-piece chicken nuggets.
Me and those two extra nuggets were laughing all the way to the piggy bank.
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From Redditor /u/…furbies:
In third grade, our teacher had to leave the room for some kind of emergency, and left one of the students in charge… The teacher said that we were not allowed to talk, and if we did, we would have to write 100 times, “I will not talk in class when instructed not to”, or something like that.
Well, my friend and I were bored, so we started writing out the “punishment”, and when we were finished, proceeded to talk to each other until the teacher returned. The student left in charge wasn’t sure what to do. It was hilarious.
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From Redditor /u/chevdecker:
My high school gave out a bunch of scholarships when I was a senior. I was the only one that applied to the “Young Democrats” one and I got it. I was also the only one that applied to the “Young Republicans” and got that one, too.
They were all given out at a big assembly at the end of the year, and they read them off in alphabetical order. So, they said “The recipient of the scholarship for the Young Democrats is: ” and my name. Polite applause, I get up on stage and get the check. “The recipient of the scholarship for the Young Republicans is: ” and me, again. I had to turn around and walk back across the stage and get that check, too, to a lot of good-natured laughter at what I had pulled.
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From Redditor /u/Hurray_for_Candy:
Favorite on-line clothing store used to do BOGO, but if you returned the item you paid for you could keep the free item. It was crazy. They must have caught on though because they haven’t run that promotion for a while.
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From Redditor /u/Guac_is_extra_:
My dad figured out a good one back in the 80’s. Just like they do now, back then cable companies would give you a free weekend trial of a premium channel (HBO, Cinemax, etc) in an effort to get more people to sign up for those channels and pay more.
However, our cable company’s method of giving you access to the special channel was to send a signal to your cable box which unlocked the channel. To turn off the channel at the end of the free trial, another signal was sent.
My dad figured out that the signal to lock it was only sent for a short period of time, so before the end of the free weekend, he would unplug the cable box and then plug it back up the next day. Since the box never got the signal, we would have a free premium channel for a while. Usually after a month or two it would get shut off so we’d have to wait for the next free trial weekend.
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From Redditor /u/LacksMass:
I found a vending machine in a college dorm during the summer that had been stocked with Susan B Anthony dollars instead of quarters. The best part is that you could use it as a change machine.
Feed a dollar bill in, hit the change button, and four dollars in coin would come out without having to buy anything. I still have no idea how someone screwed up that badly but I did pretty well for myself before it got fixed.
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From Redditor /u/ZachMartin:
I used to work at Papa Johns to pay my way through college. There was a contest we had where if you got someone to “upsize” their pizza from like a medium to a large for an extra $2, you got points towards movie tickets. A large was simply $2 extra normally anyways.
Anyone that ordered a large, I simply put in a medium and “upsized” it. I won every fucking week. My coworkers didn’t notice this obvious loophole and it didn’t cost the customer extra so I didn’t have a problem with this morally gray area. Free movie tickets every week was a huge [win] in college.
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From Redditor /u/M-V:
When I was a student, the laundromat at the end of my street would launch the selected machine if you press the # key twice. It worked for a month or two, and then it got fixed.
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From Redditor /u/mxwp:
At a rural university I attended, paid parking was actually more expensive than getting a parking ticket.
So I would just park wherever and get a ticket and just pay the ticket. I am pretty sure by now they must have normalized the prices.
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From Redditor /u/FiggyDiggz:
When I was a freshman in Highschool my geology teacher told us we had to make a presentation about igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic types of rock. He explicitly said he didn’t care how we did our presentation, but it needed a visual.
I asked him to specify how much he doesn’t care about the content of the presentation and what is allowed to be up for interpretation. He clarified that you could do a song and dance for your presentation if it was relevant to igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic.
I did an interpretive dance.
Relatively no effort, a sprinkle of shame, and a reluctant A-.
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