It would seem that if you give humans a system, sooner or later, someone will test the boundaries, poke some holes in the edges, and find that the whole thing isn’t as solid as its creators would have liked to believe.
Loopholes are the gifts that keep giving. As long as you’re smart and sneaky enough to find one and exploit the heck out of it. Think of it as the Olympics of Technicalities… and go for gold. Or for free food, free parking, free plane tickets or something equally gainful.
Someone once asked, “What loophole did you exploit mercilessly?” and people didn’t hold back. They shared the most surprising, outrageous, lucrative and legendary loopholes that they’ve leaned on time and again. From shoppers who found a way get full refunds even after using products, to those who devoured bottomless meals and drinks at the expense of none-the-wiser restaurants.
Bored Panda has put together a list of the best answers for you to scroll through while you wonder why you didn’t think of that. Don’t forget to upvote the ones that scream “genius!”
#1
If you take the survey on the back of the Popeye’s receipt, you get a free two piece and biscuit with the purchase of a drink. And you can take the survey on the back of that receipt to get a free two piece and biscuit with the purchase of a drink. And you can take the survey on the back of that receipt to get a free two piece and biscuit with the purchase of a drink. And you can take the survey on the back of that receipt to get a free two piece and biscuit with the purchase of a drink. And you can take the survey on the back of that receipt…
Image source: boygriv, Michael T.
#2
Pizza Hut partnered with a Coupon Book company.
The coupon read.. “Buy any one Pizza and get a second Pizza of EQUAL OR GREATER VALUE…Free”
So for about 2 years I would order a medium cheese pizza and get a Large Supreme for free.
Image source: Flynn_lives, anonymous
#3
A Walmart near my place accidentally marked a specific flavor of beef jerky as a dollar, I bought 70 bags over a week until they fixed it.
Image source: shawnwasim, HR2achmaninoff
#4
One GBP equals about 20 SZL (Swaziland currency) but the £1 coin is exactly the same shape and weight of the Swazi L1 coin.
Vending machines in the UK would therefore accept L1 coins as £1.
Let’s just say I had many cheap snacks and train/tube tickets…
Image source: thatshowitisisit, SDC
#5
My local Dominos has a 50% off coupon code that they give out when someone’s order is screwed up. They never change the code. I’ve gotten a lot of half off pizza.
Image source: Ikontwait4u2leave, Secvndvs
#6
The car wash station near my house: if you put in a quarter it thinks its a loonie (canada) and i can wash my car for .50 instead of $2. i have been using this method over 4 years.
Image source: 197NINE, Marroy2006
#7
If you work in education and have a .edu email address you can almost always get student pricing on services that offer it (Amazon, Spotify, etc).
Image source: Privilegedwhiteb, Emojisprout emojisprout.com
#8
I once got a card to put in my car window to allow me to park at an event. The wording on the card was vague and just pretty much said I was allowed to park there. I used it while I was in college to park in the closer teacher spots.
Image source: _teeth_marks, normalLichen777
#9
When I worked at Target, I’d buy 2-3 games at a time. Some of them I’d play for a few hours before deciding I didn’t really care for it. Since the products were open, I couldn’t return them to Target. I learned that Walmart would exchange the game for you, no questions asked without taking the wrapping off the new game. So I’d take my opened games to Walmart, exchange them for unopened games, then take the unopened game back to Target and return it for the full price.
Image source: bangersnmash13, JounochiK
#10
One of my student’s job had a grossly overpriced Kinder Bueno vending machine in the break room.
One day I accidentally realised it opened like a normal fridge.
I’ve eaten approximately a gazillion Kinder Bueno in the course of 2 weeks without telling anyone – but my best coworkers.
#11
Think Ill finally share this one. On the youtube mobile app, you can skip all the ads in the middle of the video by skipping through to the end of the video you are on, then clicking on the replay button. Sometimes, you will get one ad you have to watch, but its so much better then watching all of the ads in the middle of the video.
Image source: shxnizer, SetupSpawn
#12
At Dominos here in Australia you used to be able to order a supreme pizza for like 5 bucks, remove 3 toppings, and replace them with any other toppings they had whatsoever. So you could pretty much turn a ~$12 dollar pizza into a $5 pizza. It was brilliant, I saved so much money over like a year and a half. Until one day their shoddy web team figured it out and fixed it. Now you pay for any topping you add, even if you remove one.
Image source: anon, Brenden2000
#13
We didn’t have much money when I was a kid, but my mom ended up getting a timeshare at a local resort. It had a huge, amazing pool with a waterfall, hot tub, UNDER WATER SPEAKERS PLAYING JAZZ, basically a kid’s dream of a pool. My mom would take me, my siblings, and my friends to swim there all summer long. We even had birthday parties there.
Never actually stayed in the resort though! My mom would just say “I have a timeshare” if anyone ever stopped her, and I guess nobody ever checked if she was actually staying in the hotel lol.
Image source: uncool4skool
#14
When I was back in High School my orientation was arts. So in my entire class there were tons of people that were good at drawing. We went partying and in Germany they stamp your hand at some locations to show you’ve already paid entrance fee AND that you’re the appropriate age to get all the hard alcohol. Two older classmates got their stamps and they came back out after 5minutes. On the parking lot we copied the stamps. We had brought a palette of different colored pencils for this, as the stamps change daily.
We all got in.
Image source: lookingForPatchie
#15
More of a glitch I suppose, but when Redbox first started their app was much less robust than now. My wife discovered if you added a movie to your cart then hit checkout, then back, it would keep the movie in your cart but change the price to $0. We rented probably 30 movies for free, a few each week, until they finally updated the app.
Image source: TigersNsaints_ohmy, Adventurous-Pen-5048
#16
Vending machines at work stopped taking money and started giving out things for free over the holidays a few years back, I notified the bosses it was broken, waited a week it wasent fixed so I let everyone know at work how you could get free snacks from the machines.
Those were empty within 24 hours.
Image source: Nolsoth
#17
My high school charged 0.10$ a page for black and white printing and $1.00 per page for colour printing. When you logged on to the computer at startup, it would then say “applying system settings” or something like that. On your desktop was your printing account balance where you could add funds to print whatever you needed to.
After some trial and error and a bit of poking around, i found out that each computer had a list of profiles saved to its internal hard drive, allowing you to sign into a computer with the network cable unplugged.
It also turned out that doing this gave you administrator level access, admins printed for a $0.00 fee for black and white or colour.
I’ll leave it at that 😇.
Image source: tucsondog
#18
A grocery store by me has a policy that if you found food that was expired you could bring it to them and get a non expired version for free. I was really poor and did this a lot. They really hated me for it and started adding rules like oh you have to spend the amount that the items are worth….
Maybe take the expired food off your shelf.
Image source: Jubjub0527
#19
When I was a senior in high school, way back in 2008, I had an open slot in my schedule for the first semester. I enrolled in a class we called “cadet teaching.” In this class, you could request to be placed with any teacher in our district to help out for one period per day. I requested to be placed with my old grade 3 teacher for the first half of the semester, and with the junior high band director the second half. You basically helped the teacher grade papers, monitor students while test taking, and help out in anyway you could (read: free teaching assistant). In a perfect world, this class is geared for students considering going into education in college. However, most people at my school treated it as an easy blow-off class.
On day one orientation with the coordinating teacher, he walked everyone through the syllabus and requirements for the class. He explained to us that the 80% or our grade would be derived from our “participation.” This meant showing up each day, being productive, and being beneficial to the teacher you were paired with, and not a waste of their time. The remaining 20% of our grade came from completing paperwork. Not a monumental task, just doing weekly logs of what you did during the week.
I thought about this for a total of about 4 seconds, and raised my hand to ask a question.
Me: So the paperwork portion of the grade is really only 20% of our total?
Teacher: Yes that’s right.
Me: So you’re telling me that if I do exactly none of the paperwork or logs, and show up everyday, the absolute worst grade I can get in this class is a B- or 80%?
Teacher-… *gears turning in his head*…
Me: *raises eyebrows*
Teacher: Yes that’s correct. *promptly cringes inside*
Cue a grin on my face and a few chuckles from other students.
I had a great semester helping out my two favorite teachers that I had had up to that point. They had nothing but good things to say about my work and helping them. The coordinating teacher asked me a few times in the beginning of I was going to turn in my logs, and I would simply say “nope” and continue on with my day.
The grading scale was changed the next year to a 50/50 split, I think.
Twelve years ago I think I hit my peak. But it was worth it.
Image source: brints01
#20
Free late night movies. id walk in and act like i had a ticket and noone would ever check me because it was like 10pm at night with 2 workers on concession.
Image source: JaCrispyMcNuggets
#21
At Burger King, a double cheeseburger meal cost more than a two cheeseburger meal for years. Pitch the two bottom buns and boom, double cheeseburger.
Image source: KaraPuppers, skynet_666
#22
On my first year of college we used to go to a night club that included two consumptions with the ticket. So you paid the ticket and they gave you two receipts that you could exchange at the bar for whatever drink you wanted.
Well, the receipt were printed with the very same machine model and with the same paper that the library in our college printed the receipt for returned books with.
Every Friday we took a lot of books and returned them using the automated system at the library that would give us a receipt for us to prove that te book was returned.
Later that night we’d give those receipts to the busy bartender that could not be bothered to check those were real.
This went on for months!!!
Image source: Mattsup
#23
When I was in high school, my friends and I discovered a horribly unhealthy “extream coupon” buy.
The store was running a promotion of “$.99 energy drinks”. The same energy drink was simultaneously running a promotion of “buy 10 energy drinks, get $10 in store credit”.
We cleared out 3 stores over a summer break and spent $30. We did this so we could have 3 check out lanes constantly scanning all of their inventory. When the managers caught on to what we were doing, they would go through the same stages. First they’d make sure we weren’t doing anything illegal, make sure they weren’t doing anything they could get fired for, then they’d help us off load their entire stock. The next day we went to try it at a few other stores, but word got out of discovery and the store shut the promotion down.
I drank so much Amp that summer. I remember staying up for 2 days running on nothing but Amp and doritos. We were out in the desert building jumps for our bikes in the Phoenix AZ heat. I threw up, went home and slept for like 16 hours, and gave away the last of my energy drink loot. To this day the thought of drinking an Amp makes me feel uneasy.
Image source: Sweetpants88
#24
Little Caesar’s used to have a memory game (4 colored buttons that make a different sound, plays a sequence that you have to repeat and each time it increases by one) that I was a savant at. Top prize was a free pizza, and I’d almost always win. Spent a lot of time at my family’s business that was a few doors down, and one of the employees would send me down with a quarter whenever they wanted pizza (I didn’t really eat it, it is bad.). After getting 25 cent pizza for months it suddenly became one pizza per week on the machine, then one a month. Eventually the top prize became garlic sticks or something, but I found a machine years later at a different location and did it again for old times.
Image source: Nosefixer
#25
I went to a science high school and signed a contract that required me to enroll in a science/engineering related course (they have a list of courses you can enroll in) so that I can experience the benefits. First of all, it was quality education as it’s one of the top high schools in the country. There was also no tuition fee, but the cherry on top was that we had a monthly stipend.
Not adhering to the contract meant a student would pay the equivalent of about 5000 US dollars for tuition, and return however much of the stipend they’ve accumulated. It’s pretty heavy for a family that had to rely on a scholarship for their child’s high school education.
The loophole is that the contract stated that we were to *enroll* in a science course, and didn’t mention anything about sticking to it or getting a degree from that program.
Many of us end up shifting to a different course after as little as one semester. I’ve shifted courses twice and am now in a degree program that is not on the list.
Image source: NoelleYu
#26
In high school we were not allowed to smoke in school, neither were we allowed to leave school territory
I read the rule book and found that they considered the sidewalk right in front of the building to be part of the school.
Combining these, I was able to enjoy a smoke every noon break by leaving the school building but not the territory. They allowed it on the condition that I did not share this loophole with the other smokers.
Image source: catfeal
#27
Pizza Hut. If you fill out their dumb surveys, they give you a $10 off your next purchase coupon – but you had to spend at least $20, and you could not be using any other coupons with your purchase.
Now, anybody who gets a lot of Pizza Hut knows that there’s no point in buying anything *unless* you use a coupon, because the normal menu prices are inflated. So the $10 off coupon is effectively useless, since it typically yields no better results than the persistent coupons yield anyway.
However, for a couple of years, Tuesdays were called Tuscany Tuesdays, and you could get pasta + breadsticks for $5 (normally priced $6 at that time), and tag on an extra pan for another $5. And (important part)… this did not count as using a coupon. So you could, in effect, use your $10 survey coupon on Tuesdays to get 4 pans of pasta and 10 breadsticks for only $10 total.
Similarly, Wing Wednesdays allowed you to get boneless wings for $0.50 each (instead of the normal price, which was something like $0.60 each at that time), and it didn’t count as a coupon. Therefore, with the $10 off coupon, I could get 40 wings for only $10 on Wednesdays.
Pizza Hut has since eliminated these loopholes. But it worked for a few years, and it was nice while it lasted.
Image source: ForQ2
#28
School was full of them for me ,I had some learning difficultys growing up so I wasn’t the most well learned kid but I was clever
So the school had that typing test so we all day down to take it and we had to write like 20 words per minute
I was doing 13 becouse my ability to spell was bad
So I got into the computer settings and changed my counter to count letters per minute instead of words that way I could see how good I am so I do the test and get my score and then do the maths in it on some scrap and I was averaging around 22 to 23 words a minute witch is a passing grade
The teacher congratulated me later that day on getting the score and then told me she new how I did it but isnt going to fail me becouse “technically” I followed the rules.
Image source: BLAKERS_1960
#29
The YouTube Music app doesn’t let you listen to music while your phone is off. I found a loophole. Some apps have lockscreen mode. While on an app look at the bottom right of your phones navigation bar. If there is an emblem right of the 3 lines, that app has the lockscreen mode. What this does is it essentially turns your phone off, but it isn’t completely off. This keeps the battery usage at a minimum with the screen on, but not bright enough to see anything. This prevents your phone from turning off. Since my phone isn’t technically off, the music still plays. I love that.
Image source: Troyota__41
#30
Need for speed high stakes on Playstation 1. You could race for pink slips. So me and my friend would copy a save file and transfer it to another memory card and race for cars and just sell the car we won. Save with new account balance re copy file and rinse and repeat until we had enough money to buy the McLaren lol.
Image source: Lunitunz
#31
I lived by a movie theater so I went a lot. The large popcorn was like $11 dollars but had free refills. I was a broke middle schooler so I would go into the movie, grab a large popcorn bag out of the trash, and rip the bag down the side. I would then take said large, ripped popcorn bag to get a refill and ask for a new bag. Thus, a free large popcorn In a new bag for free!
Image source: WorkComputeAccount
#32
There’s a mediocre streaming service by the name of Fubo that costs something absurd like $75/mo when you include the sports package. The thing is, if you don’t have cable, it’s very difficult to find a single streaming service that includes all NFL games. Fubo allows you to create a 7 day trial, like most services, but what they don’t do is require that you put in a new CC/email when making a new trial. So every week during football season I’ll make a Fubo trial, watch it for 7 days, then cancel. The next week I’ll fire up a new trial using the gmail +1 trick and the same CC as before, and repeat the process.
Image source: Calgamer
#33
GameStop’s 7 Day return policy. If you bought a used game and returned it within 7 days you’d get a full refund. It does not take more than 7 days to beat a game.
Image source: anon
#34
When CVS first came to town, they sent out mailers with several in-store coupons for $ off anything from a certain category ($3 off hair care, $5 off vitamins, etc.). Figured out quickly that if you bought something that was for less than the coupon amount the excess would apply to anything else in the store, and you could use all of the coupons in a single transaction.
And did I mentioned I lived in a large apartment complex and lots of my neighbors just threw the coupons in the recycle bin by the mailboxes? And CVS sent another round of coupons about a month later? I ended up with so much free lotion, shampoo, TP, etc. I didn’t have to buy that stuff for years!
Image source: Turd_Ferguson_POTUS
#35
Years ago when I was a freshman in college, Papa Johns ran a promo for the Super Bowl where if you called the coin toss correctly, you would get a voucher for a free 1 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. Ate free for six weeks. I was also not what you would call healthy in those days.
Image source: TheDrunkenOkie
#36
I don’t know if this counts as a loophole but when I was in high school my buddy worked at Subway. This was when they had the rewards card that you filled out with stamps and after eight subs you got a free one. I guess the employees were supposed to trash them when they were redeemed but he just put them all in a box. One day he gave me a box full of them and I ate free subs until they discontinued the rewards card years later.
Image source: anon
#37
Local pizza place gave me a coupon for a free up to 3 topping large pizza if I also ordered a $5.99 order of garlic knots. For the last year or so I’ve called once or twice a month and placed/paid for the order over the phone.
I then go in and pick up the pizza. They have yet to actually ask me for the coupon so I just keep using it and the code keeps working. I did ask the employee if they wanted the coupon early on, but the person at the counter said “Nah” and laughed. I thanked them, left, and never asked again.
Image source: anon
#38
The coin operated laundry in our dorm had vertical coin slots and if you placed the quarters in the fingers of a latex glove and then place them in the slots you could hold the opening of the glove push the handle in and then withdraw it with quarters still in the slot. The machine would start and then simply repeat the process for every load you needed.
Image source: Buffasippi
#39
When I was younger I had Family Link on my device. For those of you who don’t know, Family Link is a standard family monitoring app, and one of the things it could do is lock down my phone during bedtime hours. If I unlocked my phone during this time, a screen would pop up that says “Time for Bed”, and I couldn’t get past said screen until morning. However, young me quickly discovered that the phone needed to be connected to the internet, and I found that if I turned off my wifi and data, my phone would not lock. Even though I couldn’t access the internet, I could still play the games already downloaded to my phone, so young me was a happy camper.
Image source: dacen_the_doughnut
#40
There was a npc store in Lineage2 that would sell basic crafting materials. If you purchased 9999999999 at one time the price would overflow back to like 2gold. then sell the 99999999999 items back to him. rinse and repeat.
Image source: buffinita
#41
My buddies and I used to save on movie tickets by buying 2 for all of us and splitting the costs. 2 of us would go in, 1 would go out pretending to go for a smoke with both ticket stubs and bring in another buddy. That buddy would then take both stubs and bring in another buddy and we’d repeat this until we were all in.
Probably wouldn’t work now since I think most theaters have a no re-admittance policy.
Image source: YounomsayinMawfk
#42
As a kid when payphones were everywhere, I would jamb the coin slot with grass and come back the next day with a paperclip to retrieve the quarters from the coin return. Not much of a loophole but it didn’t say anywhere on the machine that it wouldn’t accept grass.
Image source: Telorvehc20
#43
At my college there is this food app that offers deals and coupons on nearby restaurants. There was this promotion on the app that allowed you to get a free entree from a select few local restaurants if you invited a friend to the app and the friend would also get the freebie. Basically, I sent the app to all of my close friends and family and got a whole bunch of free entree coupons redeemed on my app.
But wait that’s not all… since I go to college away from my home state, I was able to invite a lot of high school friends to the app then log into their accounts on the app to also redeem their free entree coupons.
The only downside was that I had to pickup food under a million different names at the same few restaurants and I’m sure the local Thai restaurant owners were sus of my rotating identities lol.
I was eating like a king for a solid few weeks. I miss being on campus and learning in person sometimes :(
*Edited for typos.
Image source: Adamjr4bachelor
#44
10 minute breaks are closely regulated but bathroom breaks can be taken at any time and don’t count as your 10 minute break.
Image source: mylifeisathrowaway10
#45
A while ago some cell phones had the ‘submerged indicator’ on the battery….
I accidentally submerged my phone
I Dried it out
Replaced the battery
Then brought my phone to be replaced because it wouldn’t turn on.
Image source: willbeach8890
#46
Back in the 80’s radio shack would take returns on video game cartridges for the color computer. The manager bragged they couldn’t be copied. With a piece of tape over a pin of the cartridge I would dump the data at a starting address for the cartridge to a cassette tape. Once done I could remove the cartridge and plug in my 5.25 floppy drive and copy the tape to disk. I repeated the process until I had all the games.
Image source: 404photo
#47
I piled up the buy one regular sub get one free coupons from a newly opened Jersey Mike’s.
They haven’t made money on me for three months.
Image source: Ennion
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