40 People Share What Loopholes They Exploited

My math teacher in seventh grade told us if we put “toaster” as an answer anywhere in our work, she would count it right. She said it so quietly that only a few people could hear. I had forgotten about it until finals that year and I had no idea what six of the answers were, so I put toaster and she gave me full credit for all six. She wrote that she had never graded one where someone put that

Our dog is supposed to be in her crate while we eat dinner. She considers it being in the crate if her hind feet are in there.

When I was a kid, I found a laundry machine that gave you 5 quarters instead of 4 when you put a dollar in. Abused that like crazy as a broke kid.

And by abused I mean I did it like 5 times then went to do other stuff

For appointments that cost money to cancel with less than 24hrs notice, they often are free to reschedule within that window, so you reschedule it to a week later, then cancel it a day or two later.

Some McDonalds have a 4 piece nugget on the dollar menu. It's often cheaper to buy 3 of those (12 nuggets and three sauces) and a fry separately than it is to buy the 10 piece meal.

When you're playing a phone game that wants to charge you extra to play without ads. These are between levels and sometimes during play.

As the game is loading (before you start playing) turn on airplane mode and the game now runs ad free. The trick is to let it load THEN turn off your connection. You can't save your progress online, but it's a small price to pay for preventing full-screen ads with no timer or x.

Some of these games will actually tell you that you're playing the ad-free version when you do this.

One time the local mall was having a guitar hero contest back when those games were super popular. Whoever got the most points on a song throughout the whole day won tickets to see Stone Temple Pilots. What they didn’t know was their contest was fatally flawed to anyone that actually knew the game. If you play a song on expert like cherub rock and hit most of the notes, you will naturally get a higher scorer than if you hit every note in a song like Mississippi queen just because there are way more notes in the song, so that’s what I did, played cherub rock and got a score of a couple hundred thousand, and no one beat it the rest of the day, and I won the tickets.

There is a limit on how much money an individual can move out of China each year. One guy created a shell company in another country, sued his parent company, and didn't show up to defend himself. The judge automatically gave the lawsuit to the plantiff, moving millions out of China.

There was a guy in Texas who bought a $500k house for just $16. No one had lived in the house for 3 years and the bank had not claimed it so he just filled out a $16 form claiming ownership and the house was his.

I have purposefully booked flights I had a good hunch would be overbooked, then show up the day of, claim the rebooked flight +$500 voucher and have myself a damn good time in vegas for 48 hours

One time when I lived in the barracks, the rule was you could only have a 6 pack of beer, a bottle of wine, or a 750ml bottle of liquor in your refrigerator. A guy down the hall kept a 30 pack in his room, and when they came by to do inspections one day they tried to give him sh*t, but the beers were just in his room and not in his refrigerator. We received an updated SOP shortly after that to remove that loophole

Company cafeteria had an option to order a half burrito. However, the cost of two half burritos was less than the cost of one full burrito. On top of that, the chef would make a half burrito by cutting a new tortilla in "half" and generally gave a healthier portion than just a half. Thus, ordering 2 half burritos was equivalent to about one and a half full burritos and cost less than a full burrito.

My microwave stopped turning on, so I went to Best Buy to get a new one. I tried the old one in another outlet and it came back to life so I reinstalled it. Returned new microwave to Best Buy. Went back home to see that the old microwave had now died again once more (for good) and then just drove right back to Best Buy where I bought the brand new microwave I just returned as an “open box item” for half price.

Probably a fluke, but it was a rare instance of “the system” working in my favor.

Opening Day in my Major League Baseball city: it is cheaper to park at a meter and get a ticket than to park in a legal parking lot.

When I was young (~12yo) I received a free chicken sandwich coupon for Chik-fil-a that I got from a contest at school. There was no fine print on it. No exp date, no "one per customer", no nothing. So I used my dad's photocopier at home and made a f*ck ton of copies, talking like 100 copies. Every week my mom would drive me to Chik-fil-a, wait in the car (I think she was embarrassed but didn't want to suppress my enthusiasm), I'd go inside, and walk out with a couple free sandwiches.

Did it for like a year before we moved away. Pretty sure the highschool employees just took pity on a 12yo and honestly didn't care enough to say no. I work in marketing now and fine print is one of the things I proofread 3 times before approving.

Here's the one that saved me $100.

For some f*cking reason, my car got towed from a Taco Bell parking lot while I was at a store next door for only a few minutes.

$100, cash only, to get it back, because typical towing company.

I looked up the state law, and to request a private tow at a business, the owner of the establishment must be present. A manager is not good enough. Since they probably don't even know who owns that particular place, obviously, that didn't happen.

Got my car back, no charge.

some guy with a math degree won tens of million in a small time lottery by figuring out a way to almost almost always win by buying a certain amount of tickets (10k worth or so).

Applying for graduate schools, all the apps cost money to submit ($50+ each usually) but you can often get them waived if you're a member of certain organizations/groups (stuff like honors societies, career development orgs for underrepresented minorities, etc.). I found out that just being an APPLICANT (which was free) for one of those groups counted for the fee waiver, and got application fees waived for over half of the schools I applied to, even after being rejected from that program.

While I was at university, my department at one point switched from requiring students to hand in physical copies of assignments to digital submissions. Apparently a few people on another course had some problems with the procedure on deadline day, so the department sent us a note round saying that to cover for that, anyone who submitted incorrectly on deadline day would have their individual deadline extended by 12 hours.

Cue a load of students deliberately submitting unfinished assignments incorrectly so they could get the extra time.

In Sydney, Australia, we have the Opal card system for public transport. You load up the card with monies, and tap it when you get on and off public transport. Now these days, per week you get a discount on all your trips after your 8th. Well. That was brought in after people exploited the previous rule. After 8 trips, all trips were free. So people would ride the buses to and from stops, tap tap tapping away, leaving enough time between each tap for it to register as an individual trip, and after a few hours of venturing the city and tapping, they then had the rest of their weekly travel FOR FREE. The news did a piece of everyone doing it, and soon after the new rule came in lmao.