Loopholes are amazing because they show an easier way to get things done. Unfortunately, they can be difficult to come across. But not for these people.
People on Reddit share the loophole they discovered and took advantage of. Content has been edited for clarity.
A One-And-Done Contest
“About a decade ago, a nightclub had a contest night where people could earn ‘dirty dollars’ which was fake money printed by the club. The person with the most ‘dirty dollars’ at the end would walk with $500 cash. The fake money was given out by bartenders, servers, security, managers, and their friends. The staff couldn’t win, so it was basically a way to get people to act wild and crazy. Girls flashed crowds, made out with each other, licked whipped cream off of each other, etc. Guys would eat cans of dog food, drink disgusting shots, whatever.
I showed up early and bought a drink, got a little of the money as they were spreading it out to encourage people to get wild. I left around 8:30 and went to a photocopy place, and spent $15 pumping out black and white copies of this. I spent about half an hour cutting them to size. At the end of it, I had a stack of hundreds of these things. I went back to the club for about an hour before the end of the contest, quietly collected more of the money from staff for tipping well and being friendly. When midnight hit, I handed in easily the biggest stack of cash for the night to a very confused manager who was sure one of the many crazy girls was going to win.
He paid me out and asked how I did it, and I told him exactly what I did. I spent a good chunk of the money partying in the club and left with more than I started the night with.
They never ran that contest again.”
He Was Technically At The Window
“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 mad 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.”
It Had To End At Some Point
“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. 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 two 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 two 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.
We were tired of pizza after like 1 week but we kept on ordering just because we knew it wouldn’t last forever.”
They Did This For Days
“So, it’s 2009, summer, and a new water park in Florida called Aquatica had opened up. In those days, they had two kinds of lockers; small lockers for $5 and large ones for $10. Both were unlocked by keys, and if you brought back the keys for the large lockers, you’d get $5 back. Now, another thing you need to know so that there was a river that was basically the opposite of a lazy river. It had jets along the wall that pushed the current of the water to the point that it was difficult for even grown adults to stand in place. This also meant that whatever you put in your pockets would get pushed out by the current.
So, my cousin and I would use swimming goggles and we’d find the neon orange keys. We’d stagger which one of us would go turn the keys in, and we’d space it out as well to ensure the employees handling the keys wouldn’t recognize us. We’d go, turn in the keys, get $5 back, and mess around for about a half-hour before coming back to turn in some more. Between that and the cash we’d find in the river and other pools in the park (sometimes it was just free-floating quarters and mother times it was actual bills), we never had to actually pay for anything with our own money.
My dad would give us money each day so we could get this little armband thing that would let us eat as much as we wanted from any of the three restaurants in the park. We’d find so much money each day that even after spending that money, we’d still have some leftover plus the money that my dad gave us. We weren’t so much having a vacation as we were doing a job that entailed finding money and keys, and turning in the keys for money. We did this nearly every single day for the entire summer. From 9 am to 6 pm most days that we were there, sometimes until the park closed around 9 pm.”
They Had To Honor The Price
“I once bought a gorgeous, solid oak dresser with attached mirror accent that was priced at $1200 for only $1. I was on a website surfing for dressers for my newborn and came across a free shipping promotion. So I filtered results for dressers for the lowest-priced item. Up pops this dresser for only $1. Upon further inspection, I realized that the same dresser in other finishes was priced correctly at $1200. But this oak dresser was priced in error.
I reluctantly added to my cart half expecting it to update the price… but it remained $1. Plus they had free shipping that day, so my cart total was $1.06. I completed the transaction and then called their CS number. I explained and was put on hold for almost 20 minutes. The woman came back and confirmed it was an error but that they had to honor the price. The page was on went unavailable before I could let anyone else in on my find.”
But She Didn’t Take It Off
“One summer, I went to a camp where they played a Game of Thrones-inspired game at night. Basically there were four kingdoms and each had a Queen/King, prince/princess, and about 8 soldiers. The game lasted 4 nights and it consisted of invading another kingdom. When that happened, the invaded queen/king had to hide in their kingdom’s forest. If the invading team’s soldiers found the queen/king, they got to keep the land and the soldiers.
The queen/king had to wear a big, shiny crown and in the rule book, it said that we were not allowed to take it off. The rule book was huge, had over 100 rules and I’m pretty sure no one besides me read it.
I was chosen to be my kingdom’s queen. During the first three nights, my kingdom was invaded twice by two different kingdoms, but I am great at hiding and I used my hair and hands to cover the crown.
Everyone was impressed because there were only two kingdoms left (mine and another one that had invaded the other two kingdoms), and more than 30 people over the course of two hours hadn’t been able to find me.
At the end of the third night, one of the monitors saw me leaving the forest and my crown was still partially covered by my hair. He proceeded to get mad, saying that I cheated because I wasn’t allowed to cover up the crown; I, very smugly, proceeded to show him the rule book where it said that I wasn’t allowed to take it off and I never did… but it said nothing about covering it up.
Lo and behold, the next night the rules had been changed and now we couldn’t take the crown off or cover it up. That night, my kingdom was invaded and we lost.”
Four For The Price Of Two
“AMC theaters has machines that let you buy tickets without talking to someone at the counter. During the process of buying your ticket, it would ask you for your AMC account. These machines then would print out any tickets you had bought in advance for upcoming movies along with the ticket you had just bought.
Years ago when MoviePass was a thing, my dad and I both had one. But, we used the same AMC account so we could get rewards like a $5 discount faster. One time we were on two separate machines buying tickets to see a movie and both finished paying at the same time.
The machines then printed out both tickets out on both machines, so my machine printed out the ticket I just bought and the ticket my dad bought, while my dad’s machine printed out his ticket as well as the ticket I had just bought, essentially giving us two copies of each ticket.
Because AMC didn’t actually scan the tickets or check the numbers on the ticket, it meant that every time we bought two tickets we could get four people into the movie. This meant for years every time my family went to see a movie, we only had to buy two tickets and saved around $30 every time.
This loophole became busted when assigned seating became a thing and you couldn’t sit anywhere you wanted in the theater, but we were able to save hundreds of dollars in free movie tickets before this happened.”
So Much For So Little
“The Starbucks subsidiary Teavana (now out of business) would let you use your Starbucks rewards (‘stars’ or whatever they’re called) to get loose tea by the ounce. However, there was an error in their point-of-sale system that only deducted one reward point, no matter how many you spent in a given transaction.
My wife and I spent 32 rewards on a couple of pounds of the most expensive loose tea they had. She checked her rewards balance the next day, and holy moly, she still had 31 reward points left.
So we drove to a different Teavana and got a bunch of loose tea from them, and then another, and then another. We were in Los Angeles, so there was a lot of Teavanas within driving distance.
At retail price, we took a thousand bucks or so of free tea off their hands before the loophole was closed.”
All Of The Credit, None Of The Work
“I worked in a call center, and there was a huge ticket backlog which every agent was expected to work on when they had a free moment. Most people just grabbed anywhere from 5 to 10 at a time from the top (sorted oldest to newest.)
Regardless of the reason, outcome, or length of the call, a ticket closed counted for 1.
There were certain tickets (auto-generated) where you didn’t have to do anything – you just closed them. Some tickets were abandoned-cb tickets – the caller hung up, call them back. Others were ‘please call these people and give them this generic info about the product they signed up for’ tickets. All of these were searchable by phone number, region, product etc. All of this was common knowledge – no gotchas lost tricks or hidden tools.
As you can imagine, easily exploitable to rack up a high ticket count for extremely little work but still come out ‘above’ the people taking the harder tickets. Also, you could avoid being in the ‘available’ que by just chain-completing the tickets that required a callback.
So, I searched for and grabbed all the do-nothing tickets. Thirty closed. Searched for all the tickets where the caller was some 800 number (spam calls) – close. Duplicate phone# tickets too – call once, close five. Search by region, pick a time zone where people are likely to still be at work, call the home phone#, leave a scripted voicemail. For every 6-10 calls, one would have someone home. There were days where I had an hour or two of not talking to any customers.
I was top in ticket fulfillment for months. I was credited with getting the backlog to a manageable number. At first, I felt bad and thought managers would realize what I was doing and make me play fair. But after I got promoted, I realized that kind of thinking is why I got promoted and I didn’t feel bad about exploiting something that everyone else could have figured out themselves. None of my coworkers ever questioned if I was doing my share of work.”
Not Even The Workers Cared
“At a Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, Google had these tablets setup with quizzes about their products. The fastest time and the most correct answers would win a new several hundred dollar Tablet and some other goodies each day.
I found a loophole/exploit that when you finish the quiz, you can just press the back button and take the quiz again. The questions and answers were in the same exact order this way. I memorized the location of the correct answers and would make an unbeatable time for the day.
I did this three days in a row, but after the first day, I put my co-workers names down and won us all the tablets.
There was some other guy from Lockheed Martin that was super upset with me because I didn’t allow him or his friends to win. He was using a different exploit to get fast times, but his exploit made his questions randomize the order of the answers, which slowed him down.
I did not feel bad one bit. He was exploiting too, I just did it better. Forget him and his stupid posse.
The employees at the booth did not care one bit. They were all contract workers.”
He Had A Lot Of Time On His Hands
“There was a local haunted house set up for Halloween in my hometown. It took place at a nature center, so was usually a big deal being in middle school and going out at night and around spooky trees
One thing they did to help encourage folks to participate was to have a vote for the spookiest encounter in said haunted house. My friends and I saw this poll on the haunted house website and thought it was utter nonsense that the witches at the end of the house were getting all the points when the chainsaw guy was clearly the best.
Being a youth with limited computer time (home computers were starting to become more common, and I was limited to an hour of computer time after school), I got through what I needed to for homework and spent the rest of my time refreshing the page and voting for chainsaw guy, as there was no limit on how many times you could vote.
After a few days of this, I guess someone noticed just how many more votes chainsaw guy was getting, as chainsaw guy was easily 100+ points more than the witches, as I was only allowed to vote once more before it cut me off.
He still won, and I wonder if they know it’s mostly because of a bored 12-year-old.”
What Happens In Vegas Stays In Vegas
“I worked for a large telecom company back in the day. We had a corporate get-together in Vegas one year. On the sign-in website, there was one of those Wheel of Fortune spinner things, with a button to click it. There would be only one winner of the $10,000 grand prize. But you could spin as many times as you wanted, and there were lots of other smaller prizes, from $5 to $100, plus a couple of other things like dinner gift certificates and shopping cards.
Theoretically, you couldn’t just keep spinning all day. There was a built-in delay between clicking the ‘Spin’ button and when the cheesy wheel animation came to a halt. So most people gave it a few tries and gave up.
I, on the other hand, did not. I wrote a quick little script to click the Spin button, wait, click again, wait, etc ad infinitum, and then opened a gazillion browser windows to run it in. And I left it running the entire weekend we were at the company function. By the time we checked out, I had racked up over $100K in $100 hits, got hundreds of gift certificates, and won the $10,000 prize ten times!
Unfortunately, when the company high muckity-mucks found out about it, they did not take it as the ‘light-hearted prank’ it was meant to be. I was accused of ‘hacking’ and ‘abuse of corporate computer systems.’ My boss’s boss’s boss had a new butt hole ripped in him, which in turn made him feel obligated to rip a new butt hole in my boss’s boss, which in turn and eventually ended up in the creation of my own secondary sphincter.
The only thing that saved me is that I had let a lot of people in on the joke, so it was 100% provable that I wasn’t trying to steal anything. Pretty much everyone at the function, at least at my level, had known about it. It became something of a legend, actually.
In the end, they let me go with the verbal reprimand. I never got the $100K, or even $10K (nobody else got the grand prize either). I did get a stack of restaurant gift cards in intercompany mail about a month later, though. That was worth about $500 or so, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.”
Some Great Team Bonding
‘My coworkers and I would buy ice cream from time to time, and store it in the office freezer. Generally, at some point in the afternoon, we’d gather around, chat about our days, and have some ice cream. A nice time.
And then one day, it all changed.
Someone went and found that there was a sale at Weiss, four containers of Friendly’s Ice Cream for $2.50 each. Sweet! He buys four and gets an extra-long receipt. Looks it over walking out – he had spent over $20, so he got a $7 coupon for the next purchase. Except he didn’t spend $20, he only spent $10. What we (eventually) figured out was that the system was adding the FULL price of the ice cream, and using that for the coupon.
Which then started the great Weiss-capade. Over the next month, everyone in the office would take a day, the coupon, and go buy four containers of ice cream for $10. Stick them in the freezer, hand the resulting $7 off coupon to the next guy, repeat. We emptied out the ‘near Weiss’ and had to start visiting the ‘far Weiss,’ and we emptied them out as well. Then the first Weiss had more.
Until one day, no more $7 coupon. I forget the total amount, but we had two top-freezer refrigerators, they were completely full. We would have ice cream twice a day, invite strangers to partake with us, stage ignorant eating competitions and rules (you had to have at least three types of ice cream in your bowl to participate; if there is ‘a small amount’ left [judged by fellow eaters] in a container, you had to potato it [put it in the microwave and just hit the baked potato button] and then eat it all]) just to stay ahead of the storage curve.
It was disgusting and beautiful, and a great time. My guess was, we got somewhere around 80 half gallons (well, .4 gallons, grocery shrink ray and all that). Ran them out of all the candy combinations, working our way down to plain vanilla. Good times.”
It Worked Out In The End
“In high school, if you missed a class period, at the end of the day an automated message would call your home phone for your parent to hear and leave a message about the classes you missed. ‘A student in your household in grade 11 was absent for the following periods: 2…4…5’ or whatever you had missed. I skipped a lot of sophomore and junior year, but at the start of sophomore year after the message called my house a few times I tried to be a little more sneaky. My parents would always ask if I skipped and I would lie and say the teacher must have made a mistake, or the system must have picked the wrong student and called the wrong house. They believed me at first, but I could tell they were starting to get suspicious.
One day I had a dentist appointment and missed periods one and twp. My mom drove me, so she knew I would miss my first two periods. Later that day when the message called it just said I missed the 4th period. On that particular day, I actually had gone to 4th period. Since the message was supposed to call regardless of whether your absence was excused, my parents completely lost faith in the message system after that day since it should have reported I missed periods one and two, yet it didn’t. After that, I was able to skip whenever and blame the messages on bad technology. It turned out fine in the end as I graduated with a decent GPA.”