Cheat Code For Life: 30 Times People Found Loopholes And Took Full Advantage Of Them

Back in college we found a loophole with coupons at Kroger for General Mills cereal. If you bought 4 boxes of cereal each box was a dollar. But if you did the self checkout you would be printed out a coupon for $4 off your next purchase. We used the loophole to buy about 300 boxes of cereal. We only spent $12 on all of it. We would've spent less but we had to go to another Kroger once the manager got wind of us. We kept around 20 boxes for ourselves and donated the rest to the local food bank. They were so excited when we showed up with three vehicles full of cereal. Totally worth the $12 and all the time it took.

I coach a high school team; we recently bought airfare with Spirit airlines to take 9 students to a competition. Two of the students cancelled about a month out from the trip, and we had to replace them with two different students. Spirit airlines' policy: no name changes. Can't even pay a fee to change the name. The tickets are basically lost, I have to buy new tickets. Spirit's customer service is overseas, and they plainly don't care at all about customer service (because they don't actually work for Spirit etc etc). EXCEPT that Spirit airlines DOES allow passengers to correct misspellings. And these folks don't really recognize nonsense names. So over four calls, I change the names of the cancelled students to the names of the new students, two letters at a time. No one at Spirit customer service made a note (because who would care), and no one ever notices that the "correct" names during the intermediate steps were nonsense. Also, f*** Spirit.

One of my professors let us use one side of a 8.5x11 sheet of paper as a test "cheat sheet", so I cut it and made a mobius strip with it so I could use "both" sides.

When I was in high school we had a dress code where the teachers insisted we tuck in our shirts. I (like most of my friends) didn't like this policy, but apparently I was the only one to actually read the rulebook. It said, and I quote: "all shirts and tops must be worn tucked in except for those designed to be worn untucked." So, for the majority of the last three and a half years of high school, I f****n' wore Hawaiian shirts. Whenever a teacher would tell me to tuck in my shirt, I'd pull out the rulebook and quote it to them. Most would just shrug and let me to carry on my way.

My college didn't put any dates on our Student IDs. No graduation year, no expiration date, nothing. As a result, I kept using it to get student discounts for YEARS after I graduated, mostly the 15% off J. Crew discount.

I'm not sure if this still works or not, but there used to be a 1-800 number on the bottom of a Wendy's receipt, and if you called it and took a survey they'd give you a free cheeseburger. The thing is, when you got the free cheeseburger, they'd give you a receipt for the transaction. And at the bottom of that receipt... you guessed it.

Bought a s****y sega genesis game, I think it was some flight sim which was the crappiest game I ever played. So I took it back to K-mart and got told "No refunds for opened games. Replacement for the same one if broken." Annoyed that I couldn't get my money back I said it was broken and went for the replacement. They handed me a new copy of the game and my original receipt. Left and came back an hour later, "I want a refund for this game, here is my receipt and unopened game." Got my money back, went and bought a different s**t genesis game.

I was once the only person to show up to a Microsoft CRM event, since I was the only person to attend I automatically won the door prize of a Xbox 360 with a Kinect. The downside of this loophole was 3 long hours of talking with MS product evangelists who were very disheartened and desperate to make a sale.

In elementary school we had the Accelerated Reading (AR) program. You would read a book, take a test on the computer, and be awarded points based on how well you did. At the end of the year you could buy things at the book store with the points you accumulated. I had just finished reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and got a perfect score on the test. The computer was only supposed to allow you to take the test once but I figured out you could take that specific Harry Potter book unlimited times. I racked up so many points and was never found out. 

This was more grinding than exploitation, but it was fun. The grocery store where I lived had a fuel card you could sign up for. If you bought certain items, you would get $.01 or $.02 off per gallon, sometimes more depending on the item or week. One week, they run a promotion that every one of their store generics would get $.02 off per gallon, per item. I walk by the powdered KoolAid packets and notice they sell a generic version of that, 10/$1. I do the math. My vehicle has a 16.5 gallon tank. Gas costs $3.14 per gallon. Each packet of drink mix costs .10. Every packet of drink mix I buy will save me .33 at the pump. I will need 157 packets of drink mix to get free gas. This will save me $36.11. I should do this. So, I count out 157 little individual packets of drink mix, all kinds of flavors, and go to the checkout. I try to save the guy some time by telling him how many there are in each flavor, but the manager had walked by and stopped to see what was going on with the generic KoolAid. So, the poor guy has to scan every single one. The manager makes an awkward joke about the amount of drink mix I'm buying, but when I pull out my fuel card, my ploy becomes clear. The cashier reads off my new fuel discount and I'm on my way to the gas station, where I proudly fuel up my vehicle. (I still had to pay $0.16, they wouldn't let you reduce the price all the way to zero.) Then, I took all the generic drink mix and donated it to the local food pantry, because I hate KoolAid.

I worked at a sandwich shop when I was a young lass. We were allowed one free sandwich for the entirety of our employment there. Being an endless pit of hunger 16-year-olds are, I was determined to get as many free sandwiches as possible. If someone called in a phone order and never picked it up, the sandwich was fair game for employees after an hour. So I would text my friends to call in the sandwich I wanted and then never pick it up. Every day I got free sandwiches. It was amazing. If I didn't eat it, I would bring it to school the next day and sell it.

I lived down the street from a rare book store that didn't have a website. I would go in, take pictures of really expensive books, list them on eBay with a reserve of the cost of the book +$50 sometimes they would sell for $500 to $1000 over the price of the book.

My son attends speech and occupational therapy every week. Usually, it is a $35 copay for each therapy, but if I do them on the same day I only have to pay the copay once. Saves me about $140 a month!

My friend works for a company where he spends the entire week traveling and staying in hotels and he can expense any hotel. Because of this my roommate and I listed our air mattress on Airbnb for $150 and he's the only one that ever stays there. He's only even in town once every couple weeks but whenever he is we have a small house party entirely on the company's dime!

This past semester, I needed to take a Biology class with a lab to graduate. I was told that it was one of the easiest classes at my school to take, but as a lit type, I didn't agree much. It was so much information all at once, and I found it really boring, so I didn't do so well on the tests or assignments. I got Cs and Ds, even on the final which I stayed up all night to study for. We also had a class blog. There were about a hundred and twenty of us, and we each had to write three posts per semester on anything biology-related. I didn't do well in the lab section, either. I failed the multiple choice test *and* the practical, and I assumed I was f****d. However, the professor said that if we made comments on our peers' blog posts, and turned in worksheets to show what edits we made, when, and on what topic, we could get five extra points per edit. Most kids did two or three. I did 97. Got an A for the semester.

I spent 5 years on a US navy submarine. Every two years we would do a six month long deployment called Westpac.On my second deployment I got boondoggled with a few other dudes - basically, the boat goes out for deployment without us and we got sent to attend various training schools in Pearl Harbor for the first half of the deployment, then catch a flight to meet the boat. So we watched the boat steam off and then caught a flight to Pearl Harbor. We show up with our orders to check in, but there was some miscommunication, office personnel done f****d up. We aren't enrolled in any of our classes. We don't have barracks, meal chits, nothing. They had no idea we were coming. They give us something called a "non-availability chit", which allowed us to stay at any reasonably-priced hotel on the gov'ts dime. So naturally we found a palatial estate a block away from Waikiki. We show up for muster the next day and the PO more or less just told us "Yeah, I don't want to see you guys again, ever." We couldn't get a hold of our boat, because it was underwater doing secret things shhh. Once the yeomen got their s**t on straight, they realized that our return plane tickets were already paid for and paperworked up, so they just said f*** it we'll do it live. We were getting a per diem and having our housing covered by the navy, never had to muster for work, never had to check in anywhere. On top of that, we were still collecting our normal pay and allowances, sea pay, BAH, etc. For three months. I grew a beard, got high as f*** as often as possible, learned to scuba dive, did some surfing, had [intimacy] with a bunch of international tourists, went on pub crawls every weekend, did some hiking, lots of snorkelling. Woke up on the beach a few times with no recollection of how I got there. Best vacation ever. Thanks, navy.

I worked in a call center during college. Our main performance measure was the number of donations solicited PER CONTACT. If the person didn't answer or hung up immediately, it didn't count against you. I discovered a bug where, if I blew into the microphone just as the phone started to ring, it would register in the computer system as a no-answer and dial the next number. I rode this out for several months before I got tired of blowing my microphone for 8 hours a day and quit.

I used to play a lot of backgammon in Yahoo Games - and some people were real jerks when losing. Most commonly they'd stall the game by taking the maximum 5 minutes per move, hoping I'd resign. I learned a way to boot these people off Yahoo for as long as I wanted, by trying to log into their account. When I used the wrong password ten times, the account was locked for 24 hours. They couldn't log in again until I chose to allow it.

At my local movie theater, you could get a small drink for $2.50 or a large drink for $3.50, and large gets unlimited refills. Or you could get a SoBe tea for $2.50. But they didn't give you the SoBe bottle because they wanted to avoid any broken glass incidents. So they poured the SoBe into the large cup. Boom: unlimited large drink refills. I saved several dollars that way.

By accident I found a gumball machine if you turned the dial really slow it would drop the gumball, then you could dial it back just enough so the next gumball would drop into the tumbler bits, then slowly dial forward again until it drops, etc. Got about 20 of them and stopped when I realized that I really didn't want to chew that much cheap gum...