30 Times People Cheated The System After Finding Insane Loopholes

This was COMPLETELY unintentional but still a hilarious loophole.

I wanted to cosplay Lois Lane at a local con. I printed up a Daily Planet press badge with a picture of the actress who played Lois Lane in the Smallville TV show. I copied Lois's outfit in the Superman animated series and had a friend with me dressed as Jimmy Olson. We went around "interviewing" cosplayers as a bit which got a lot of chuckles and we met some cool folks. Some DC comics cosplayers even tracked us down to get pictures.

However, completely by accident, we walked past a panel room with a sign that said "press only". A bored staff member was by the door. When he say us, he waved us in! We were giggling but decided f**k it, let's go.

The panel room was where the con guests/celebrities were answering press questions and promoting upcoming projects before doing meet and greets and the like. We ended up spending most of the day in that room listening to Peter Dinklage, Alan Tudyk, and a bunch of other people chat about what they were currently working on. We didn't ask any questions because we didn't want to get caught but it was a lot of fun!! Would do again.

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.

This is no longer relevant, but it saved me hundreds and probably thousands of dollars. In 1998, I bought a digital cell phone from AT&T that only had 90 minutes of talk time per month. The rep at the store told me that to save on my minutes I could forward my number to my home phone and I wouldn't be charged minutes. I asked what would happen if I forwarded to a different area code and he told me that there is still no charge. Back in the 90's, long distance was very expensive by the minute. So I discovered that I could call my girlfriend, who was an hour away and technically long distance, by just forwarding my number to her number and calling my own cell phone. There was no charge for this talk time because it was a local call for me. I would get 10 page phone bills and would show 0.00 for every single one of those calls. I was 18 years old and we spoke every day and it didn't cost me a dime.

If you're catholic you can do anything you want and get off scot-free by going into a booth and telling a guy and then doing a couple of short chants.

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.

I didn’t find this loophole myself 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*****g 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.

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.

Figuring out that if you bring a clipboard and walk with purpose, almost nobody questions why you're there.

Arby's had a promo where if you signed up for their email address, they gave you a coupon for a free main (no purchase required.)

So I showed the cashier the coupon on my phone and they just plugged it in. No unique code or anything.

It expired in 3 months so every day at work I got a free sandwich. And on the last day the cashier said "oh we honor expired coupons"

And that's how I got completely sick of Arby's.

Discovered that my high school P.E. teacher graded on improvement. You took a skills test at the beginning of each unit, then one at the end of the unit and your grade was based on how much you improved. I was not the most gifted athletically, always got C's in P.e. before this, so I would tank the opening test, then perform my usual mediocrity at the end, but my improvement was awesome and I became an A student the last semester of high school P.E.

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.

In one town I lived in parking tickets were cheaper than paying for parking, cost nothing against your license, and the area I parked in had a satellite office right where I parked where I could pay the ticket right away. It wasn’t even that common to get a ticket.

I found these neat things on my pants that keep my belt attached to my pants.

I work at a well known Australian alcohol store, up until very recently the online store would mark down slabs (24 bottles/cans) of several different craft beers from $60-$70 down to $24. This would only happen if you put 24 individual cans or bottles into your cart instead of a slab. This guy would click and collect 24 individual bottles every week.

Obviously the staff I worked with weren’t going to unbox a slab into 24 individual bottles so we just gave him a slab.

Management told corporate about this several times over years but they did nothing until one day the man came in and said they had closed the loophole, however he was still able to just click re-order and got the same price that he had already been paying.

The company makes billions in profits each year, so more power to him!

Tldr: infinite $24 slabs of craft beer.

Not mine but many years ago a woman was attending college in Texas and paying out of state tuition. She found out that if you were a business owner in the state you could get in state tuition. She spent a few bucks to file for a business and saved gobs.

Parking at the hospital the pay machine wasn't working so I drove to the barrier and pressed the button to speak to the attendant / security... A few seconds later, without a word being exchanged in either direction, the barrier opened.

This was early on in my dad's hospital stay of about 9 months.

I didn't try paying again, just pressed the button at the exit barrier...

The local radio always have a contest where you call when they play same artist back to back so you can win a prize. Then I learned they had a "now playing" and "up next" feature on their web site. My girlfriend that time would start calling in before second song even came on. Won a ton prizes including laptops.

In university I didn’t have my own printer. Had to swipe my student ID to pay to print anything on the library’s printer. Charged something like 10 cents per page. I would go and select the document name off of the touch screen, then swipe my card and it would print as well as charge me account. I discovered that if I gave my document a really long name, the computer didn’t know what to so with it. So instead of going to the queue it just bypassed the pay screen entirely and printed.

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.

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.