Real Life Loopholes That Were Successfully Exploited

They say it’s important to work smart, not hard. Sometimes following the rules doesn’t necessarily mean doing things the same way as everyone else, and if you can figure out how to game the system in your favor you can feel like a true genius.

Here are some real life examples of people who found amazing loopholes and got their money’s worth out of broken promotions.

Cereal Killer

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.

Story credit: Reddit / RoiVampire

Password Saboteur

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.

Story credit: Reddit / Scrappy_Larue

The Eternal Coupon

I got a flier in the mail one day from a pizza joint advertising 5 dollar large pizzas on certain days of the week with a code that was valid for another month.

I’m still using the code to this day, three years later. It’s only worked at the local branch so far, but I’ve been riding that gravy train as hard as possible.

Story credit: Reddit / Solias

The Amazing World of Gumball

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…

Story credit: Reddit / Kifenstein