People Share Best Loopholes That They Exploited For Years

From finding loopholes in fast food menus to finding ways to earn some extra money, people have benefitted from loopholes in unimaginable ways. It just takes some critical thinking to figure them out.

Some people on Reddit shared the best loopholes they found and how they exploited them. Most people did it when they were younger, and finding out about those loopholes made them feel rich and smart.

Comments have been edited for clarity and grammar.

1. The Cheaper Way to Have a Sandwich

u/hear2fear: My college campus had a café with a deli and salad bar. The deli sandwiches were way overpriced, like $8 for a standard turkey sandwich, but the salad bar was very reasonable (it was subsidized to promote healthy eating).

So, I found that the salad bar had all the same ingredients as the sandwiches, but the meat was shredded.

The deli would sell slices of bread for $0.25 each, so I would just buy the bread, load up and weigh my "salad," grab some free mayo and mustard packets, and build my own sandwiches for under $2. I used that trick for my last two years.

2. The Unlimited Supply of Soda

u/some_body_else: Back in the 90s, Dr. Pepper ran a promotion where you could win stuff from the bottle caps, including a free Dr. Pepper. You just paid for the new soda with the winning bottle cap.

I learned that you could look up the bottle and barely read what was written inside the cap. I bought one Dr. Pepper and continued to "win" maybe 30 or so more Dr. Peppers. As a teen, an unlimited supply of soda was amazing.

3. Winning the Radio Station Contest

u/mahck: A local radio station had a contest where you call in when they play the same artist back-to-back to win a prize.

It turns out they had a "now playing" and "up next" feature on their website. My then-girlfriend would start calling in before the second song even came on. She won tons of prizes, ranging from concert tickets to a laptop.

4. The Glitch

u/[deleted]: When Lyft was new, it gave free rides up to 10-15 bucks if you signed up a friend. My college roommate and I did this with each other, but it glitched out, and my account had the free ride thing attached to it for the whole year.

I only had to pay if it exceeded the $ amount given for the free ride. The bar was a $9 ride, so that was very convenient.

5. The Working Hours

u/Mitch_from_Boston: I had an employer who would subtract "break hours" from your pay, regardless of how many hours you worked or if you even took a break.

So, if you worked 40 hours/5 shifts, you'd get a paycheck for 35 hours. If you worked 44 hours/5 shifts, you'd get paid for 39 hours.

I found the loophole was to work 39 hours because they would only subtract the 5 hours from you once you hit 40.

6. Free Burgers

u/Pterons: They used to have a promotion at Wendy's, probably 6 or 7 years ago, where if you filled a survey out on your receipt, you could get a free burger.

I guess they didn't notice that you could take the survey on the free burger receipt and keep getting free ones.

So we would just go after school and chain five free burgers after buying just one. We did that for a few days until they finally caught on and stopped accepting it.

7. I Didn't Break Any Rule

u/iknowvapetricks: During my senior year at my high school, we had a baby photo contest. The contest had a bunch of rules about the photos you could submit.

None of the rules said that the baby had to be you. I submitted a baby picture I found on Google and won the "Best Dressed Baby" award.

8. Chicken Nuggets

u/Gerreth_Gobulcoque: Back in the day, two five-piece chicken nuggets at Burger King cost less than a single eight-piece chicken nugget box.

Me and those two extra nuggets were laughing all the way to the piggy bank. Things get cheaper per unit as you buy more of them. This was the opposite.

9. My School's Reward System

u/Modusobit: My school had a reward system for good grades/behavior called "Swag Bucks." At the end of each quarter, you could trade them in for prizes (movie posters, dollar store toys. I think the biggest reward was a Wii).

They were just a heavy stock of red paper with a Times New Roman font. My mom worked for a printing company then, and I printed a few of them.

I made a bit of money selling them to other kids, but shortly after I hatched this genius plan, the school banned them because we were playing poker with fake money.

A teacher found out when one misbehaved student had enough bucks for a Wii and some DVDs after pulling straight Ds.

10. The College Courses

u/joeschmoe86: I took a "survey" course in college, which basically amounted to a course the school was planning to offer in the future.

It allowed the professor to fine-tune the curriculum before officially offering it as a class. Easy course. I got my credit and went home happy.

The following semester, the course went "live" and was offered under a different course number, but the description was identical. I signed up, never attended a class, took the final, and got my credit again.

11. The High School Rule

u/meinherzbrennt42: My high school had a stupid rule that banned you from attending prom if you went to a Saturday detention that semester.

I got in trouble and was assigned to Sat. D-Hall, but my girlfriend really wanted to go to prom. I just skipped it, and they kept adding more until they rolled it into a day of actual suspension.

They had no rule barring you from prom for an out-of-school suspension, so I got a day off and took my girl to prom.

12. Traveling for Free

u/[deleted]: When the Presto card first came out in Toronto (the swipe card that gets you onto public transit), the card I got was faulty from the moment I bought it.

I had loaded it with cash, but it wouldn't scan nine out of ten times. The transit operators would see me curse & swear at it and let me through the gates anyway.

Then, I'd pick up a transfer, which passed as my proof of payment. I must have done that a good 30 times in two months.

I saved myself about $100 on transit, but I didn't want to push my luck too much, so I eventually replaced the card with a working one.

13. The Drink Machine

u/mstibbs13: When I was in college, they had a drink machine that gave juice for $.75. However, there was a loophole in its system.

If you put a dollar in, it gave you five quarters in change. I got juice every day for months before they finally fixed it.

14. Free Pizza

u/nifty_swift: There was a pizza place near me that had a promotion once where they stuck a card for buy one get one in my mailbox.

The card's text said the delivery driver would collect the ticket when they delivered the pizza. They never collected it, so I used it whenever I wanted to buy a pizza for about two years. I kept it pinned to the fridge just in case.

15. I Got a Full Refund

u/ztweedz: Costco used to have a no-question-asked lifetime return policy on all items. When flat-screen televisions were a new thing, I bought one from them for 3k.

A few years later, lightning struck in my backyard, and I did not have it surge-protected. It broke. I took it back, and they gave me a full refund.

By then, the technology had changed so fast that I bought a new similar television for 1k. I pocketed the rest.

16. The Camera Deal

u/vinnySTAX: On Black Friday one year, Best Buy had a deal where if you bought some Sony digital camera for like 500 bucks, you could get a free $200 lens and $50 case as well.

I can't remember the EXACT loophole I used, but essentially, I purchased two of the cameras with lens and case, then later returned just the cameras for a full refund. I sold the cases and lenses on eBay.

Edit: I think I remember how I did it. I purchased the cameras individually, and each time I bought a camera, I could also purchase the "bundle," which included the case and lens, for around 33% retail.

The cameras weren't discounted that heavily, as the bundle was the real selling point. However, the fact that they allowed separate purchases allowed me to return shortly after Xmas and return my cameras without having to answer any questions about my separately purchased bundles.

17. A Glitch in the McDonald's App

u/refurbishedsandwitch: At one point on the McDonald's app, there was a bug where you could order 40 nuggets for one dollar because whoever set up the app forgot to add a zero.

My friends and I ordered about 200 nuggets for five dollars, then got some other stuff so the cashier person wouldn't pay attention, and we could overeat the nuggets.

18. The Paper Plane Competition

u/waytogokip: In a physical science class, we were tasked with building a paper airplane and making it fly the farthest. The only rule was that you could only use one piece of standard printer paper.

People got super serious about it. I spent the class mainly sleeping, and when it was my turn, I crumpled my paper into a ball and threw it down the hall. I was twice as far as second place.

19. At the Movies

u/YounomsayinMawfk: I'm not sure if this will still work, but when my buddies and I would go to watch a movie, we'd only buy two tickets, and two of us would go in.

One of us would then take both ticket stubs and pretend like we were going out for a smoke and come back in with another buddy. We'd do this until all of us got in.

20. The French Film Course

u/mgswong: I took a 400-level French film course (that was entirely taught in English), and it counted as three years of foreign language credit.

21. The Pizza Promo

u/TheDrunkenOkie: Back in 2013, Papa John's had a promo for the Super Bowl where if you called the coin toss correctly, you would get a voucher for a free one-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. I ate free for six weeks.

22. A Travel Tip to Save Money

u/spacerock_rider: I still use the loophole of jumping on a shuttle bus from LAX to a parking garage(/or hotel, yes).

Then, I call an Uber/Lyft from there to avoid the airport prices. Doing so brings the ride home down to $10 from $40.

23. Birthday Offers

u/zephyrcoco: My friend made a spreadsheet of all the restaurants in town that gave you free stuff for your birthday and mapped out the shortest route to take you to all of them.

Most chains do something, including Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, etc. Most require that you sign up online beforehand. Go check it out!

24. Microsoft Store Points

u/Beanholio: The Microsoft store had an unlimited-use coupon for $10 off but no minimum spending requirement. At that time, 1,000 Xbox Live points were for $12.

The website was getting hammered by requests and crashed multiple times, but I managed to buy 20,000 points for $40 before they took the page down.

25. The Scholarship Loophole

u/chevdecker: My high school gave out a bunch of scholarships when I was a senior. I was the only one who applied to the "Young Democrats" one, and I got it.

I was also the only one who applied to the "Young Republicans" and got that one, too. They were all given out at a big assembly at the end of the year, and they read them off in alphabetical order.

So, they said, "The recipient of the scholarship for the Young Democrats is" and my name. A polite applause follows. I get up on stage and get the check.

"The recipient of the scholarship for the Young Republicans is" and me, again. I had to turn around and walk back across the stage and get that check, too, to a lot of good-natured laughter at what I had pulled.

26. Gift Cards

u/butabi7293: The grocery store I frequent has a loyalty card you can earn points on to get a discount at the pump, so whenever I plan on going out to eat or buying something from a store, I first get a gift card to that store using my loyalty card and get tons of free points.

27. Tricking the School Management

u/PinstripeZebra: At my high school, if you skipped class, you'd get a computerized call home telling your parents that you didn't attend class, and my parents were strict about me not skipping classes.

But the school would hand out personal information sheets at the beginning of the year, which had all your info on it, and you could update any of it if it had changed over the last year.

So, I just changed the home phone number to my cell phone, and all those late calls came to my cell instead. My parents never noticed.

These people shared the loopholes they discovered during their lives and explained how they took advantage of them. They saved money by getting many things for free. Did you ever find a loophole that helped you access stuff for free? We would love to know about your experience.