What loophole did you exploit mercilessly?
Years ago when I was a freshman in college, Papa Johns ran 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 was also not what you would call healthy in those days.
There were several vending machines at my school and around town that had an exploitable design flaw.
You could take two bills and scotch-tape them into one long bill, one face up and one face down.
When you put the bill in the machine, it would read the first bill correctly and the credit would show up on the machine, then it would try to read the second, but since it was upside down, it would then spit both bills back out, and I could buy what I wanted with the credit it read from the first bill.
Last year my local burger chain had a promotion for one week where you could get a free order of fries, no strings attached.
You went to the online store and there was a “Free Fries” item that you could add to the cart.
Being a web developer, I took note of the exact network request made when you clicked “Add to cart”.
Basically the request looked like “POST /cart { itemId: 672 }” where itemId 672 corresponds to the free fries item.
Well, after a week, they took the free fries off the menu.
But, I still had the web request saved, and to my amazement, calling
the request directly with the correct itemId still added the free fries to the cart!
Now, a year later, I’ve claimed 30+ orders of free fries, over $100 of value.
Every time I go to order from the store I cross my fingers praying it’s not been fixed yet, but at this point I’m not sure they ever will address this.
I don't know if this counts as a loophole but when I was in high school my buddy worked at Subway.
This was when they had the rewards card that you filled out with stamps and after eight subs you got a free one.
I guess the employees were supposed to trash them when they were redeemed but he just put them all in a box.
One day he gave me a box full of them and I ate free subs until they discontinued the rewards card years later.
Local pizza place gave me a coupon for a free up to 3 topping large pizza if I also ordered a $5.99 order of garlic knots.
For the last year or so I've called once or twice a month and placed/paid for the order over the phone.
I then go in and pick up the pizza.
They have yet to actually ask me for the coupon so I just keep using it and the code keeps working.
I did ask the employee if they wanted the coupon early on, but the person at the counter said "Nah, beep this place" and laughed.
I thanked them, left, and never asked again.
When I worked at Target, I'd buy 2-3 games at a time.
Some of them I'd play for a few hours before deciding I didn't really care for it.
Since the products were open, I couldn't return them to Target.
I learned that Walmart would exchange the game for you, no questions asked without taking the wrapping off the new game.
So I'd take my opened games to Walmart, exchange them for unopened games, then take the unopened game back to Target and return it for the full price.
The ducks at the park are free.
I'm just rolling in that free duck money now
If you take the survey on the back of the Popeye's receipt, you get a free two piece and biscuit with the purchase of a drink.
And you can take the survey on the back of that receipt to get a free two piece and biscuit with the purchase of a drink.
And you can take the survey on the back of that receipt...
the car wash station near my house: if you put in a quarter it thinks its a loonie (canada) and i can wash my car for .50 instead of $2.
i have been using this method over 4 years.
One of my student's job had a grossly overpriced Kinder Bueno vending machine in the break room.
One day I accidentally realised it opened like a normal fridge.
I've eaten approximately a gazillion Kinder Bueno in the course of 2 weeks without telling anyone - but my best coworkers.
The coin operated laundry in our dorm had vertical coin slots and if you placed the quarters in the fingers of a latex glove and then place them in the slots you could hold the opening of the glove push the handle in and then withdraw it with quarters still in the slot.
The machine would start and then simply repeat the process for every load you needed.
If you work in education and have a .edu email address you can almost always get student pricing on services that offer it (Amazon, Spotify, etc)
Pet shop is a free zoo.
At Burger King, a double cheeseburger meal cost more than a two cheeseburger meal for years.
Pitch the two bottom buns and boom, double cheeseburger.
We didn't have much money when I was a kid, but my mom ended up getting a timeshare at a local resort.
It had a huge, amazing pool with a waterfall, hot tub, UNDER WATER SPEAKERS PLAYING JAZZ, basically a kid's dream of a pool.
My mom would take me, my siblings, and my friends to swim there all summer long.
We even had birthday parties there.
Never actually stayed in the resort though!
My mom would just say "I have a timeshare" if anyone ever stopped her, and I guess nobody ever checked if she was actually staying in the hotel lol.
When I was younger I had Family Link on my device.
For those of you who don't know, Family Link is a standard family monitoring app, and one of the things it could do is lock down my phone during bedtime hours.
If I unlocked my phone during this time, a screen would pop up that says "Time for Bed", and I couldn't get past said screen until morning.
However, young me quickly discovered that the phone needed to be connected to the internet, and I found that if I turned off my wifi and data, my phone would not lock.
Even though I couldn't access the internet, I could still play the games already downloaded to my phone, so young me was a happy camper.
When I was in high school, my friends and I discovered a horribly unhealthy "extream coupon" buy.
The store was running a promotion of "$.99 energy drinks".
The same energy drink was simultaneously running a promotion of "buy 10 energy drinks, get $10 in store credit".
We cleared out 3 stores over a summer break and spent $30.
We did this so we could have 3 check out lanes constantly scanning all of their inventory.
When the managers caught on to what we were doing, they would go through the same stages.
First they'd make sure we weren't doing anything illegal, make sure they
weren't doing anything they could get fired for, then they'd help us off load their entire stock.
The next day we went to try it at a few other stores, but word got out of discovery and the store shut the promotion down.
I drank so much Amp that summer.
I remember staying up for 2 days running on nothing but Amp and doritos.
We were out in the desert building jumps for our bikes in the Phoenix AZ heat.
I threw up, went home and slept for like 16 hours, and gave away the last of my energy drink loot.
To this day the thought of drinking an Amp makes me feel uneasy.
Pizza Hut partnered with a Coupon Book company.
The coupon read.. "Buy any one Pizza and get a second Pizza of EQUAL OR GREATER VALUE...Free"
So for about 2 years I would order a medium cheese pizza and get a Large Supreme for free.
Thought of another one.
A few years ago the [US Mint offered free shipping on dollar coins at face value to in the hopes of getting them into distribution.
Unfortunately a bunch of unethical assholes such as myself maxed out all of our rewards cards by ordering thousands of dollars worth of coins.
We then drove to our banks, deposited the coins we had just received, paid off the charges, and then ordered more coins.
Rinse and repeat until they killed the promo.
I and many others racked up literally hundreds of thousands of miles/points while
the program was live.
EDIT:
Clarified it was the fact that were spending thousands of dollars on rewards cards that granted the points.
It had nothing to do with the bank.
there was a npc store in Lineage2 that would sell basic crafting materials.
If you purchased 9999999999 at one time the price would overflow back to like 2gold.
then sell the 99999999999 items back to him.
rinse and repeat
A Walmart near my place accidentally marked a specific flavor of beef jerky as a dollar, I bought 70 bags over a week until they fixed it.
Typing "Rosebud" in the Sims
The Fortify Restoration loop, Skyrim
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