53 People Who Found Ways To Cheat The System

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 f**king 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.

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 f**king 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 in college.

Back in the 1960s, the 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 is a scholarship fund for people living in that old district's area. The district is gone, but the scholarship still exists! I applied, and got the scholarship. I don't think there were any other applicants.

When I was a kid my town had a "slow bike race" tournament. So the objective was to cross the finish line in last place, the key is to keep your balance. Well the rules stated that each time your foot hit the ground you would have 5 seconds subtracted from your time. But it didn't say anything about keeping your foot planted on the ground. So once the race started I just stood there and waited until everyone else finished, waited a good 5 seconds after that, then just rode across the finish line.

Ultimately they didn't let me win which I think is horse s**t because they wrote sh**ty rules and a 12 year old found a loophole.

I'm not sure if they do this anymore, but many years ago, while an employee at HomeGoods, the store had this promotion where, employees could get these scratch-off cards that reduced the cost of an item by 1/5/20 dollars each time they found a price sticker on the floor. Each card had three scratch-off areas, and the catch was that you could only scratch off one.

However, if you used a lamp, you could see which scratch off area was the 1/5/20 - meaning that you could very easily rack up a 20 dollar gift card for every sticker you found on the floor.

The idea was that if employees collected these fallen stickers, regular, nefarious shoppers, couldnt stick them on something of far greater value and check out at that price.

There were no rules on how many an employee could have, or combine, because most folks who worked at that store were middle aged women who really couldn't give a f**k and most of the stuff HomeGoods sells is garbage.

But then there was me - a starving, broke college kid, who got paid s**t, but who worked in the back room unloading trucks, and who also was occasionally tasked with stocking shelves. In short, I was the only person who seemed to give a s**t about this promotion, and my bosses, who wanted to show their higher-ups that they were putting the corporate programs into effect, were happy to oblige each sticker I presented with a scratch off ticket of my own.

Now HomeGoods, while normally a purveyor of fine garbage, also occasionally has very nice, very high end, house-wears on the cheap (comparatively), these items, like cook-wear, linens, comforters, etc, are more often than not, usually much more expensive than the rest of the store's stock, and take a while to sell.

For me, the guy who unloaded the trucks, this meant that when I saw something absurdly nice, I could put it very high up into a loading bay, and just let it sit for a while, because the senior citizens I worked with would never go up to get it.

At the end of a 4 month summer, I'd amassed about 1100 in these little gift cards, and with them I bought:

A full set of AllClad copper core cookwear (a new piece came in once a month)

A Queen sized down comforter, duvet cover and sheets

Pillows

Nice flatware, Plates and Glasses

A dozen useful kitchen tools

To this day, ten years later, I still have all the AllClad, which alone retail for 800, and some of the kitchen tools.

All of it for free.

Not very impressive but at my highschool 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.

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.

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.

Back in 2013, Papa Johns had a promo for the Super Bowl where if you called the coin toss correctly, you would get a voucher for a free 1 topping pizza. However, the only control in place was you could only enter the contest one time per email address. I created more than 60 emails, half of them calling heads, half tails. Ate free for six weeks.

I've said this before on alt accounts that are now erased, so do forgive me if the wording is different. I'll be saving it this time so it remains consistent after this account is erased and someone asks a similar question.

In the summer of 2009, a new water park, Aquatica, opened up in Florida. My cousin and I went nearly every single day, from open to close,for two months. It's my favorite out of all the water parks I've visited with many awesome rides and attractions. But, for the purposes of this question, we'll be focusing on just one ride and a couple other things: the River and some of their restaurants.

See, the park had lockers where people could store their stuff: small, and large lockers. Smalls were $5, large were $10; but if you brought the key for the large lockers back, you'd get back $5. There were also three restaurants in the park: one was a buffet, one had great chicken tenders and fries, and another had awesome burgers. Luckily for my cousin and I, there was a pass you could get that let you eat unlimited at all three restaurants for the entire day.

Now, the keys did come with a wrist strap so you could always have your key on you and not lose it, but most people would stick the key in their pockets and go into the river, not realizing that it wasn't the typical lazy river and, in fact, had some pretty powerful jets under the water to keep things moving. Even full grown men can have trouble standing in the middle of the river, due to how fast it was going.

Well, my cousin and I figured out within the first couple of days that people were just losing their keys and loose change all over that river. We could've done the responsible thing, which was to turn in the lost keys and pocket the change, but we were teenagers and assholes.

So what we did instead was turn in the keys, yes, but as if it was our own key, and we'd pocket the $5. We would alternate who would turn in a key, as well as time it so that each time we did turn in a key, it was with someone brand new, further lowering the chances of getting caught. We'd turn in an average of about 10 keys every single day. We'd then use that money, plus whatever change we'd gathered to buy the eating pass, and pig out. Add into that the fact that my dad was actually giving us money so we could buy the food pass, and we were turning quite a bit of profit that summer.

He spent his money on hair stuff, and I spent mine on videogames.

Best summer ever.

Math lesson

Teacher: For this project you will work in groups of less than seven. Me: Sir, one is less than seven. ... Teacher: Ok, fine. Do it all yourself then.

I got 70% on this assignment, highest mark I ever got in group work.

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, and 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 couldn't check the available balance, so he'd buy one, use the balance up on whatever, them use the card for parking until the end of the month when it'd get processed, found to not have funds, and banned. Rinse and repeat.

Guy saved probably $2500 over his degree.

My high school had a stupid rule that banned you from attending prom if you went to a saturday detention that semester. I got in trouble and was assigned to Sat. D-Hall, but my girlfriend really wanted to go to prom. I just kept skipping it and they kept adding more until they rolled it into a day of actual suspension. They had no rule barring you from prom for an out-of-school suspension so I got a day off and took my girl to prom.

I was working maintenance at McDonald's when they did a Best Buy bucks promotion. Large sodas and large fries had a scratch off that was worth at least $1 at Best Buy.

I would go through the trash daily, pulling out all the discarded scratch offs.

I got a free computer that year for Christmas. I also had the poor cashier at Best Buy in tears. She had to manually scan each scratch off and verify the dollar amount.

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's pet", of course). 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.

I purchased a wireless keyboard at least eight years ago, maybe ten? It's awesome, except I broke one of the keys about two years later, so I contacted the manufacturer to see about just buying a replacement control key because it's awesome and I thought just the key would be cheap. But they said it's still under warranty and they sent me a replacement. About two or three years later, a similar thing happens and I'm all set to throw down $$$ for a replacement, but the replacement keyboard's warranty time started when they sent me that one, so I wound up with a replacement for my replacement. This just kept going on.

I'm currently on my third or fourth replacement keyboard. I've lost count.

(Over the years, the design of the keyboard has improved so much, the current one is not at all identical to the original K800 I purchased, but it's still a fantastic keyboard. If they would ever give me an opportunity to buy a replacement, I would.)

My brother once yelled "last one to jump in the pool is gay," and then jumped into the pool. However, I figured out that if I did not jump in then technically he would be the last one in the pool, and he is still gay to this day.

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. 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. 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.

Certain retailer had Xbox Credit at £10. Instant digital download.

They also had an offer, £10 off your next order.

I tried it with the credit, it worked. Sweet, free £10 code.

Then I saw you could get a new discount code every 60 minutes.

I got £1200 in free Xbox credit before the discount codes stopped working.

An agreement I had with an employer on school reimbursement with additional pay.

I had to agree to remain at the company until X date and they would pay for my schooling + additional pay for various things. If I left, I had to pay the money back. (Edit for context - I received reimbursement + bonus at the end of every quarter based on completion of a class + a certain grade. I had already received ~$20k at this point) The parent company of my division changed after the agreement was signed and time came for me to get the cash owed to me. Head of HR refused to pay. I went to him and asked why I wasn't getting the check we agreed to. He stated that the agreement was with the previous parent company and therefore was no longer valid. He had this smug look on his face, but then he noticed I had a big smile on my face. I could tell he couldn't figure out why. I asked him again if there were refusing to pay and he said yes.

I then stated that I no longer have anything binding me here, because the contract stated "if I willing leave the company, I have to repay the money." He agreed and asked what my point was. I then stated that if the parent company did change then I did leave said company, but I did not willingly leave. Therefore, I did not owe any money if I left this company as it was not the company I signed the agreement with. The expression on his face changed. I continued on with, "If I, hypothetically, put my two weeks notice in now, I would be able to leave without owing any money."

It didn't take him long. He realized by stating that the agreement was longer valid because the company changed that he gave me the information I needed to get out of the contract. He agreed to pay me the money. Spoiler alert, he was fired a few weeks later for various reasons. He was one of the worst HR directors I have ever seen.