The best loophole I’ve ever learned about is closed now.
Early in the Dubya administration they were pushing the dollar coins pretty hard. They went through a whole thing where any government coin-operated machine had to take dollar coins (veterans of the time mostly saw this as it mostly effected military bases but this is why the stamp vending machines at the post office suddenly became useless; they now took dollars instead of quarters).
One of the ways they “encouraged” the use of dollar coins was selling them directly on the Mint’s website. You could go on the US mint’s website and pay face value for them with a credit card, and they paid for shipping. Spend $500, and 500 $1 coins would be shipped to your door.
So people would order tens of thousands of dollars in coins on a credit card, as soon as they arrived they’d haul the coins to the bank and deposit them, immediately pay off the credit card bill with the deposited currency thus accruing no interest, and then they’d have all those rewards points to spend. The government was taking it up the ass shipping tons of coins to residential addresses, the goal of putting them into circulation utterly failed because they were being taken directly to banks, the credit card companies were taking it up the ass on rewards points that weren’t generating enough interest payments to feed the parasites. The policy got canned.
Imagine getting to fuck over a Republican administration and the parasite industry in one perfectly legal move. Too bad I was 14 at the time and wasn’t allowed to have a credit card.
I remember hearing about this one. So simple, so effective, it’s beautiful.
Not something I did, but something a former ‘friend’ did:
Make a shitty dinosaur game, release it on Steam.
Get Steam to support your game’s items on the Steam Market Place.
Some other friend wants to buy a game?
You want to buy a game?
Use your admin powers to directly create rare in game items, then trade the items to your friend who then sells them, or you sell them yourself.
I think he managed to functionally defraud Steam of around a thousand bucks doing this.
… This is the ‘career path’ of a garry’s mod rp server admin, who would write viruses into the lua files which would be automatically downloaded and executed (escaping garry’s mod and steam!) by any one who joined his gmod server, such that either Garry or Valve had to completely rewrite the way lua was executed in the source engine to prevent this exploit.
Anyway, last time I talked with him, he’d gone fully through the 4chan kekistan to QAnon to actual outright white supremacist fascist, has had several of his Steam accounts entirely VAC banned.
ITT: fraud
lol
Tried cancelling adobe. They wanted to charge for the rest of the year or something as a cancellation fee. Instead, I “upgraded” to a more expensive package, giving me their 14 day refund policy and was able to cancel immediately and still gave me access to the rest of the month. Fuck adobe
Pirating adobe will always be morally correct
Fuck adobe
“Walmart rentals”
If you need a product for a project but can’t afford it, go buy it at Walmart, use it, and when you’re done return it. Their return policy is pretty no questions asked, especially if you have a receipt. I had a roommate do this with an iPad he needed for a semester in college. I think it was a 14 day return policy, so he’d back it up and take it back every 13 days, then just buy a new one and repeat until the semester was over.
Even if you don’t have a receipt, actually. I’ve returned things I bought at Target to Walmart and gotten a refund. Granted, that was a few years ago.
I’m from the UK but aware of this because of the movie Garden State
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Credit card manufactured spending. Still doable, but I think it’s more difficult now.
You sign up for a fancy card with a fancy offer. Say, spend 6k in 3 months, get 1k in points.
Then you go to the local post office, and buy a money order for 6k. They used to be more permissive about letting you charge it on the CC, with only a nominal fee.
Then deposit that money order to your bank, use that money to pay off the charge for 6k. Boom, free signup bonus achieved.
There was a time you could get an AARP credit card that had 5% cashback, you don’t have to be a certain age to join AARP in order to get the card. At the same time the federal reserve was letting people buy quarters in bulk without any shipping fees. So, order thousands in quarters, take them straight to the bank, repeat.
A guy i work with does this but he buys visa gift cards.
But visa cards charge a fee, so the quarter idea is probably better.
Yeah, office supply stores will occasionally have sales the fees they charge for visa gift cards, which make that an option.
In Australia most retailers discount specific items for “members”. Being a member is free but you need to sign up with your contact details. They will give you a card but no one carries a million cards so cashier’s just ask for your phone number.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority administers phone numbers in Australia and they publish a list of phone numbers which may not be used by telco’s and are reserved for the exclusive use in TV shows, films, and creative works.
I made a note of one of the numbers in my phone, and provide that when asked. Loads of other people are doing this so the number is always registered at every shop.
The conversation usually goes:
- cashier: are you a club member?
- me: yes.
- cashier: what’s your number ?
- me: <ACMA number>
- cashier: oh. wow. there seems to be hundreds of people with this number. what’s your name?
- me: oh really? who’s there?
- cashier: uh, nigel, john, luke…
- me: I’m Luke.
I’ve been doing this on a weekly basis since reading about it in another thread (on reddit) a few years ago. I’ve never encountered a problem and I’ve received thousands of dollars in discounts. I would’ve gotten those discounts anyway but would’ve had to sign up with my personal number in order to receive them.
In the United States the same concept has sloshed around a bit; (xxx)555-01xx is the official range of “reserved for fiction, guaranteed not to connect” numbers; most people think it’s all of 555. It isn’t, there was a directory assistance service on 555-1212 until 2020. In the first Ghostbusters film their phone number is given as 555-2368. I’ve seen a number of fictional programs give a number as 555-5555. If they ever were reserved, they’re not now. The 555 exchange is explicitly NOT reserved in the toll-free area codes, which is how The Last Of Us accidentally included the number of a sex chat line. “I thought 555 numbers weren’t real.” No it’s more nuanced than that.
Then there’s 867-5309, made famous by the band Tommy Tutone. They wrote a song about finding a girl’s name and number written on a men’s room wall and used a valid phone number. In fact, because no area code is given it’s several hundred valid phone numbers. Across the United States in the early 1980’s a few hundred random people started getting prank phone calls asking for “Jenny”. The number remains valid and several are still in use and even specially requested but I don’t think they’ll issue it sequentially anymore.
In the US, this typically works with (zip code)-867-5309
Issue with that, at least in the u.s. is that stores often give you points that accumulate that can be redeemed for certain dollar amounts or a big discount on a single purchase.
Many years back, at a caravan park games-room they had ping-pong, pinballs, pool, and a cocktail table Space Invaders.
I had little money for the videogames and pinball.
Some older kids had figured out that going to Space Invaders and flicking the wall power switch off, for a tenth of a second, would sometimes give an odd-number of free credits.
We played 7, 21, and then maxed out the registers at 99 credits.
Everyone played in rotation all day and turned it off with about 20 left.
My typing class had early computers that graded on speed but not accuracy. So you mashed the keys and got 140 keys per second, and an A in the class. So now I’m a 50-something year old who types like a 13 year old. Somehow the rest of the class didnt figure this out.
Similarly, in my typing class, they’d have you type the same paragraph a few times. The program didn’t notice copy and paste.
My typing class wanted me to learn how to type with my hands spaced just right, using different fingers to reach each key. But by then I had already been using a computer and just kind of developed my own way of typing efficiently and quickly mostly just using my index fingers. They’d correct my hand position whenever they saw me type, but I was one of the faster typers in the class, so I’d use my own way for the tests and passed easily. I’ve tried to force myself to go back and type like they told me, but by now I’m just much more used to my own spurious method. 🤷♂️
Had a computer savvy friend watch me type once and he audibly went “what the fuck”
I used to be exactly like that, could even type blindfolded with my own weird way of typing. I eventually learned touch-typing (i.e. the correct way your teachers were trying to teach you) and a more ergonomic keyboard layout (Colemak), I haven’t gained any speed, but I do notice that I get a lot less strain on my wrists and fingers. So if typing is something you do a lot on a daily basis, then it’s worth learning to do it properly to not injure yourself in the long run.
Same here
I went to Catholic school, so probably the poophole loophole
There was a time when Discover would give you checks that you could use to transfer debt from other cards or accounts, which had a promotional rate of 0% for the life of that debt. I deposited one check into my checking account that filled up my discover card credit limit, then used that money to pay off my higher rate Discover Card debt. Then I did that a few more times until my entire Discover Card balance was 0%. This made my credit spending look amazing, because I had such a huge amount coming in and going out each month, and I soon started getting offers for much better card rates. Then I paid off my other credit cards while that debt sat there accruing no interest penalty.
Also, the way the accounts worked was higher debt would be paid off first, so until I fully paid off that account, there was always some 0% debt below all the higher % debt.
TL;DR: Discover Card let me my entire credit card debt through my checking account, making my credit score look wonderful and at the same time dropping my interest rate to 0%.
“There was a time when…”
Sounds similar to the tactic of serial debt transfer to one 0% interest card after another. Discover probably realized their program wasn’t motivating enough people to use Discover cards for actual spending.
When I was in high school my friends and I were always finding creative ways to skip school and instead go out and do stuff. But, there was a limit of X days that you could be absent throughout the year, or else you’d have to make up the time by attending summer school.
In a conversation with some school admin staff I discovered that if you attend just one class during the day, any absence for the rest of the day was counted as 0.5 days in the attendance system.
So, we effectively doubled the number of days we could skip school by showing up for the first hour and then getting out to e.g. attend a dentist appointment.
Cool story bro, and yes I would like ketchup and ranch with my fries.
I had a pager that I didn’t want to pay the bill on when I went out of the country. I called them to turn the service off while I was gone. Instead of turning it off they just quit charging me. I realized that when I got back and had a bunch of pages. That continues for several years until I traded it away, still working, still not costing anything.
Nice! But I would call that a screwup on their part, whereas a loophole is a glitch built into the system.
