Real Life Geniuses Who Took Advantage of Some Serious Loopholes
Loopholes may show themselves in many ways. Sometimes they are caused by clerical errors, while other times they are the result of missed details. These Reddit users took advantages of flaws in the system to gain enormous profits, save money on expensive things, and fool computer systems.
And with a little luck, they didn’t even get caught for their sneaky ways.
Read Closely
In high school, our science class had one of those projects where you had to drop an egg and build something to not have it break. The assignment sheet said, “fall six feet without breaking”.
This particular teacher was a stickler for following instructions, often taking points off for little things like not putting the date in the preferred format on stuff.
Come the day of the project, one of the kids who has no obvious egg-catching contraption walks up to the front of the class where the measurer thingy was, lifts his egg up about half a foot above the six-foot marker, and drops his egg.
It splatters all over the floor and the teacher tells him he’s getting an F. That smug legend had the perfect reply.
“Why? The egg fell six feet without breaking”. I wish we had camera phones back then because the look of realization on the teacher’s face was epic. The teacher tried to tell him that isn’t what he meant but we all reminded him about “always following instructions”.
He ended up giving him an A, and the next year the instructions were much more precise. It was amazing.
Four For the Price of One
The Walmart by my house used to have this craft brew display (Lagunitas for those familiar) set up in their booze section. They had big sealed boxes of four six-packs stacked on top of each other to make the display, then they had individual six-packs sitting on top.
But they had made a huge mistake.
I guess the box of four six-packs had the same barcode as an individual six-pack, because when I scanned the big box at the self-checkout it only charged me for a single six-pack. It was like buy one get three free!
I did this like every other day for a month, I had boxes upon boxes of this stuff stacked up next to my fridge lol!
I even got stopped twice by the more vigilant employees when they checked my ID to put in their approval code on the self-checkout machine and noticed the price on the screen. I played dumb both times and they didn’t really do much except make me put the box back and get a single six-pack.
They didn’t change the display though, so I just went back the next day and did it again. Eventually, they took the display down, but boy was that one inebriated summer!
Reason For the New Rule
When supermarkets entered India, they would give a printed-out receipt and the security guy at the exit would check your receipt and eyeball the groceries…to prevent shoplifting.
But here’s how we cheated the system.
You would drop off the groceries at home, hand over the receipt to someone else, and that someone else would enter the supermarket again, buy the exact same stuff and walk out without paying.
They would show the receipt and drop off the groceries at home, then hand over the receipt to someone else…etc.
The people who figured this out tried to keep it a secret, but word got out, and the supermarkets handed the security guy a rubber stamp that said “delivered” or “exited,” and made them stamp every receipt.
Cog in the Wheel
A while back they got new keypads at my job that wouldn’t let you punch in if you showed up late for work.
It would just say, “too late, see a manager” and then you’d have to go through the awkward process of telling your manager, having them follow you up the stairs, and they had to sign a late slip for you.
One day, I figured out a genius solution. If I put a nine at the end of my four-digit key (because it doesn’t overwrite the last key) I could punch in late without being penalized. Naturally, I exploited this loophole whenever I was too late for work.
Eventually, they caught on to what I was doing and had a manager talk to me and tell me that if I showed up late three more times (three strikes) I’d be fired.
I think the only reason they didn’t fire me then and there was because they didn’t want to admit there was a loophole in the system.