15 People Confess To How They Get Away With Exploiting Loopholes

There are many definitions of a "loophole," but it's safe to say that finding one you can take advantage of can feel like hitting the jackpot!

Stephanie

• Published in Interesting
• January 25, 2020

We all love a good loophole, right? Whether it's getting a great deal on something, or getting away with something you otherwise may not be able to.

Or perhaps it's finding a way around something, or finding a way to get your hands on something you wouldn't normally be able to. There are many definitions of a "loophole," but it's safe to say that finding one you can take advantage of can feel like hitting the jackpot!

We have 15 stories below of people who have managed to do just that. Scroll down to read how these people have gotten away with exploiting their chosen loopholes for as long as possible.

Enjoy!

#15 Technically, totally legal.

“Husband used to work for a local grocery store chain that has gas stations. About 10 years ago they came up with a promotion: buy groceries, after a certain amount spent earned a few cents off your gas per gallon. Something like $100=$0.05 off per gallon. Nice.

Except when it first came out they didn’t think to limit it. Families would share the same points card and build up points until there was more off per gallon than it cost, making it free. Then they’d get together, enter the points at the station, line up their cars and everyone gets a free full tank of gas. Technically totally legal.

Not long after they put a cap on how much off could be earned and one car per transaction. But for those people who pulled it off, kudos.

Edit: I should have clarified, it was Tops friendly markets in Western NY USA. Guess they’re not the only company to screw up a promotion like this.”

#14 Enough soda for a year and a drawer full of batteries.

“There was this Kmart promotion where you had to buy a pack of batteries and three cases of soda, and you’d get a $20 gift card. The total was $19.12.

My friend/roommate and I went to every Kmart in Las Vegas (each separately) and kept reusing our gift cards to redo it. By the end of the day we had enough soda for at least a year and a kitchen drawer full of batteries.”

#13 Print as many pages as you want for the price of a single page.

“My university printer system. Send 2 documents to the printer. First one is a single page, second one is the long document you actually want to print.

When you go to the printer, you select the first document and delete it. The second document moves up and gets selected, but the price doesn’t get updated. Print out as many pages as you want for the price of a single page.

It was their own fault really. Getting us to print out 20 page state diagrams when we could have just as easily handed it in by sending them a file.

This was a long time ago, and the bug was fixed, but only shortly before I graduated.”

#12 I basically had a “free” streaming service.

“Not exactly a giant loophole, but I used to live in a very rural area with really slow internet. Anyway, I’d rent movies on amazon and stream them and the definition would get pretty rough sometimes and it’d have to buffer a bit, but overall not enough to ruin a movie for me.

Well Amazon will refund you if rented a movie and it gets a notice that the streaming wasn’t great. I rented a whole bunch of movies I normally would never pay to rent and got refunded for all of them.

Yes I was sacrificing quality, but I basically had a “free” streaming service until I moved and got better internet.

Edit: to clarify, I never requested any refunds. I’d usually get an email a couple of days after renting a movie saying something along the lines of “We noticed your streaming experience wasn’t up to par, here’s a refund.”

#11 I made so much money!

“At my job we sold LED lights and for a couple of month the electric company was doing a rebate on them. They were 10 dollars a two pack of lights but with the rebate it was a dollar.

The limit was 5 boxes of lights per transaction. So customers where getting 50 dollars worth of lights for their house for 5 dollars.

I got 10% commission on anything I sold and since the electric company was paying for the bulbs I was getting commission on it. Everyone walked out of there with 10 light bulbs.

I would help around 100 people a day. I was selling 5,000 dollars worth of LED light bulbs a day on top of all the other stuff they would buy. I would give 10% off your entire bill if you for some reason they didn’t take them because even if you spent $200 and saved $20 I was still making an extra $30 off you.

My company also had a sales competition to see could sell the most lights. I made so much money those months.”

#10 They didn’t notice for a couple weeks.

“The grocery store fucked up and marked all the Tonight Dough Ben and Jerry pints to $1. They didn’t notice for a couple weeks. I ate the shit out of that.”

#9 I ate 25 free medium pizzas.

“Got like 25 left over coupon books from one of our football team fundraisers, at the time i was a teacher/coach at a high school. Each book had a coupon for free medium pizza no purchase necessary.

So i ate 25 free medium pizzas the next 6 months.”

#8 10k in gift cards.

“Not me, but my roommate. He used to go to the casino and buy 10k in gift cards with his credit card.

He would then cash out the gift cards and pay his credit card bill with the money. His cash back was pretty insane until the casino made him stop.”

#7 He ended up with 4 million airline miles.

“I had a buddy that worked for American Express when the new dollar coins came out. He was able to secure a $40,000 line of credit given he worked there.

He would buy 40k in coins for the points, open them all, take them to the bank and tell them he was a coin dealer looking for misprints and they would deposit 40k into his account. Rinse and repeat. He ended up with 4 million airline miles off his card.

He once took a trip over seas, instead of finding a hotel he would fly somewhere first class that was an 8 hour or longer flight so he could sleep. He was also able to buy tickets for people at $0.03 a mile.”

#6 No possible repercussions.

“Old call centre I worked at made it very clear that calls less than 2 minutes, and greater than 15, would never get listened to by QA ( which to their credit, was accurate the entire time I worked there ).

All that meant was those of us who had an asshole we didn’t want to deal with, could just put a caller on hold for 5-10 minutes for no reason as we “looked into that” for them, and then hang up the call with no possible repercussions.

Never saw how stupid of an idea that was, at least up until the time I left.”

#5 Delete. Re-download. Repeat.

“Back when the McDonald’s app first came out it didn’t require a log in and when you first downloaded it you got a free signature sandwich.

I would just delete the app and re-download it every time I was hungry.”

#4 For the cost of one page.

“My college’s printer apparently saw pdfs (or something like a pdf) as one page so some friends printed the entire D&D players handbook for the cost of one page…multiple times.”

#3 Against the rules.

“My college had a dining hall with continuous hours from ~730 AM – 9PM. The meal plan I could afford only gave 1.5 meals/day with a decent bit of flex money for the various campus vendors.

I discovered fairly early on in the school year that if I entered during the latter half of a particular meal’s service and parked myself around the midpoint of the seating area with my laptop and a textbook while staying quiet, I could typically work one single meal ticket for 2 full meals plus plenty of beverages.

Pretty sure a few of the cafeteria ladies knew what I was up to, but because I kept my space clean and wouldn’t cause any fuss, they never told me to leave despite it being against the rules. They probably assumed I was studying, which was accurate maybe half the time.”

#2 Vending machine profit.

“I found a vending machine at work that didn’t differentiate between quarters and golden dollar coins when dispensing change; when it was supposed to give you quarters about half of them were golden dollars.

I put in as many $5 bills as possible and bought the cheapest item available and got ~$8 of change back each time. My total profit off that machine was over $50 before it ran out of golden dollars.”

#1 Unlimited popcorn.

“A local movie theater offered a $15 unlimited refill popcorn bucket at the beginning of the year, I have saved hundreds of dollars in popcorn because of this bucket (even will stop by just for the popcorn if I’m in the area)”

Do you have any loopholes you regularly take advantage of?

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Stephanie