50 People Share Loopholes That They Exploited For Years Before Someone Found Out

Had intermittent anemia in college that I was trying to improve. But the blood work was about $100 each time.

I started donating blood and if I was too low they’d turn me away and I’d keep trying to up my iron. If I was high enough, I got to donate to a good cause.

Win win!

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 damn if it didn't jump start my retirement.

I used to frequent a sandwich shop (they've since closed) that could be very busy at times due to how close it was to a convention hall. The process for ordering food was much like that of Subway: approach the counter, tell them what you want, you get to sit there and watch them construct your sandwich. They had room enough for three sandwich makers: two people behind the counter and one guy manning the back area for pick up orders. They almost always had a guy dedicated to the pickup window and during peak times he would help out, but his priority was phone orders. The window was marked "Pick up for phone orders only!"

There were many times (when the inside was packed with customers) where I would literally stand outside this window placing an order on my cell phone with the phone order guy laughing and shaking his head while he took my order and made my sandwich. I could see the customers in line inside and they could clearly see me.

One time, a customer in line got pissed and started complaining about me "cutting the line" and that I couldn't place my order at the window since it was for phone orders only. The guy behind the counter said that there wasn't anything wrong with what I did since I did place my order over the phone, I just happened to be standing at the window when I did it.

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!

Not sure if it counts as a loophole, but I worked at a books/music/video store when I was in high school. We were supposed to remove the "in training" portion of our name tags after the first two weeks. I just left mine on so that customers wouldn't ask me questions. A full year of hardly anyone talking to me at work was the best full year of my life

Not me, but a friend of mine (among others I'd assume) managed to get an entire sales campaign cancelled that a bank in my country did.

IIRC the bank tried to promote one of their debit cards (which are basically prepaid credit cards) via some bonuses and gifts you'd get as customer, e.g. one of 20 products you can choose for free if you start using it etc.

One of these bonuses they offered was a small payback, you'd get after each purchase. What they did was basically rounding up the amount you paid (to full Euros) and give you the difference. So if you bought something for 27.63€ you'd get 37 cents gifted from this bank.

What he then did was only possible because we were university students back then, had very flexible work time and some of our friends were temping in super markets... he went to the super market our friends worked at at times when basically no one else was there and purchased hundreds of single potatoes. Each one = one purchase with the card. Depending on their weight each of these potatoes was like 2ct or 3ct, so for each purchase he got 98ct or 97ct gifted from the bank, making him profit about 94-96ct for each potato. He got about 250€ (plus an unreasonable amount of free potatoes) in 2 days with this until the bank called him like "uh... could you like maybe stop that...?" and he just shamelessly responded "why?" to which the bank person on the phone had no good answer. So then he just went on and made some more money until the whole incentive thing got completely cancelled a few days later.

Fun times.

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.

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.

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!! 😭

When I was in college they had this deal where if you signed up for a free trial of Netflix you could get a $10 gift code for Papa John's.

They didn't even ask for a credit card back then, just an email, so I would just use make new email addresses and would get a code every time.

Not only did I get free Netflix for a while, but I also got a lot of free pizza.

Kroger used to have a thing where if you found something expired on their shelf, they would give you the expired item, and a fresh one for free. In college we would go to the local Kroger at midnight and hunt for expired stuff. Mainly ended up finding breads, other bakery items, meats and cheeses as those were the hardest items for them to keep track of. My roommates and I would walk out with a full cart of free food every week.

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.

My school had uniforms, it was kinda strict with those... but nowhere in the rules it stated that girls should wear the female uniform and boys the male uniform. Sooooooo, I bought the male one and wore it. A lot of teachers wanted to give me detention, but when I went over the school rule book and s**t, they had to stay steaming mad because I was not breaking any rules. They assumed it was implied, but the only think stated was that the uniform was to be worn properly, be clean and fit well, but that's it.

By the time I graduated, a lot of students were doing about the same s**t I was.

That rule changed shortly after my generation went off to university. sorry kiddos, maybe you will find new loopholes to give the inspector an aneurism

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!

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.

I was visiting a hospital on a daily basis for many weeks ( premature twin babies) but they didn't do multi-use discounts. "There's the hours you were here - pay up" type of thing. And it was costing something like £5 - £10 per day

Until a few days in I realised that the hospital had only recently appointed the car parking company and they haven't yet installed the "arrival time" machine at the car park entrance but had only put a temporary machine in the Hospital lobby . . . . which you were meant to use on your arrival.

And from that day on I got my "arrival time" ticket when I was leaving and only paid minimum stay.

Carl’s Jr. app offered something like 10 points for “checking-in” each time you visited. Once you had 100 points you could get a free $6 burger

Well, I figured out the “checking-in” counted as long as your cell phone was within maybe 100 yards or so of the restaurant.

And I drive past a Carl’s Jr. right before my house

So I would check in on the way to work each morning and check in again on the way home

Free burger every 5 days

Then they changed it so 100 points was a BOGO instead but it was good while it lasted

Not really a loop hole I guess just a way I ripped Pizza Hut off for a couple thousand dollars in food and drinks. Back many years ago when places were just starting to set up their websites for online ordering I found a way to refresh the page the right way where I could enter a coupon code to take 10% off as many times as I wanted to. We did a practice order to make sure it worked. We did like a $30 dollar order and brought it down to like $7 and paid with a $20 and let the driver keep the change. Since it worked we started doing bigger and bigger orders. We would only get like 2 pizzas but we got lots of wings, deserts, cheese bread and drinks and other random side items. Our orders were coming out around $90 and we ordered every single day and many days twice. A couple of times the delivery guy said "your total is . . . . wait that can't be right . . . . $8?" We told him our uncle worked for corporate and gave us really awesome coupons and always tipped the driver really well. This went on for about 2 weeks of ordering at least $100 from Pizza Hut every single day. Some days we would order twice. All good things must come to an end though and one day it just stopped working. Some nights I lay awake tossing and turning thinking of how awful a thing I did to Pizza Hut . . . jk I regret nothing, it was awesome and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It was part of a great summer. We were tired of pizza after like 1 week but we kept on ordering just because we knew it wouldn't last forever.

My city council is offering 3 years of unlimited public transport throughout the 6 transportation areas (around 200km radius), if you give an old motorcycle or car to the city council for its destruction. They are doing this in order to reduce the amount of polluting cars on the road.

They do not require for the vehicle to be insured, to pass any certification or to work by the time you give it to them. As long as it's in one piece, they'll accept it. They'll even pick it up from wherever you leave it.

Bought 2 absolutely trashed motorbikes that were not even in use for around 350€, waited 6 months (minimum ownership period they require), then called the city council for pickup.

I should receive 2 unlimited transport cards in a couple of weeks (one for me and for my wife). As they last for 3 years, it'll come out for around 5.5€ /month. The equivalent 6 area month card goes for around 113€/month, so pretty good deal overall.

I worked at a restaurant in a hotel where you could collect "employee bucks" of sorts for going above and beyond at your job. You could use them to pay for things like a room stay or food in the hotel restaurant. They were worth a dollar each, but you obviously couldn't cash them in for real money.

I saved up about $450 worth, used $100 worth to pay for a hotel room on a day I was working, bought a soda from myself at the restaurant and tipped myself the extra ~$350 and signed it all to my room bill. Upon checkout it just shows that I spent $350 at the restaurant, not a breakdown of the bill. So then I used my employee bucks to pay off the hotel bill and got an extra $350 on my paycheck (minus taxes of course)