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.

Alright, so, in Texas you're not allowed to own an opossum as a pet. There is no license for owning a pet opossum (they're "fur-bearing animals"). However, there is a license that'll let you kill opossums for their fur. Furthermore, said license allows you to trap them. The interesting part is that there's no legal requirement for you to actually kill the opossum if you trap one. You can trap the opossum and take possession of it for however long you like.

So basically a hunting license (might have been a trapping license?) lets you effectively own an opossum as a pet in Texas!

Edit: also, yes, opossums are as soft as they look, which is why people used to hunt them for their fur. I got a chance to pet one and it was about as soft, if not softer, than a cat. Also very boney, like cats.

My bank's mutual fund let me buy and sell at yesterday's price, so every time the stock market went up, I bought, and when it went down, I sold. I talked to a teller about it, wondering how much money the mutual fund rule designer had pumped out of the bank by then. They quickly changed the rule into a non-insane form: today's price.

I should have just shut up and kept pumping money out of the idiot bank, but I was young and stupid. The bank was in the game, the bank was fair game.

If you want to cancel a subscription for whatever reason, worst comes to worst (dark pattern nonsense like trying to cancel an Adobe subscription) you can call your bank and request for a replacement card

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:
• 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.

Go to a climbing gym. "I think I left my drink bottle here last week. It was clear, about this size". Worker pulls out a box of lost and found drink bottles. "Oh, that is it there". Take a dusty one (so you know it's been there a while, and nobody's coming back for it). Now you have a new drink bottle! Give it a clean and go!

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.

You can't cancel your reservation within 24 hours. You can rebook it. Okay, rebook it for one week out. Call back a day later, cancel.

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

On my old commute, there was this one really long red light with a u-turn and merging road to the right you could take. Since the merging road was there, a right turn was allowed.

On busy traffic days, you could take the u-turn if the light was turning red and just go and skip it with a right turn. Pretty sure it pissed people off, but it was legal as far as I could tell.

In the USA the FASFA is used to determine how much financial aid (grants, or zero interest loans) someone can get for university

Unfortunately it looks at parents assets as well as the adult students assets.

Unless

• over the age of 25
• military veteran
• married

So the loop hole here is obvious, two students should get married, then their financial need will be totally unmet and get the highest level of benefits

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.

There was a burrito shop that had a frequent customer card that you could use to earn points towards a free menu item. You could register the card online and for whatever reason you could add multiple cards to the same account.

A friend of mine realized that if you registered a new card they would give you a decent chunk of points just for signing up, then you could merge that account in with your existing account and get free points.

Every chance he got he would grab handfuls of the cards, activate them all, and get tons of free food.

Not drinking isn't one of the 12 steps

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.

My brother-in-law didn't want to carry his jacket around at Disney World, and he didn't want to get a locker for it, so he had his dad turn it in to lost and found. At the end of the day, before leaving the park, he picked it back up.

If you get married the tradition is for one partner to change their last name to match so both have the same last name.

We didn’t do that, so we have different last names.

So when you sign up for services that offer (x) months free or discounted cost per unique household, you use one name, cancel, and sign up under the other name. They don’t know you’re married, don’t know if it’s a rental, or don’t know if it’s a roommate thing. So when we were poor AF we could save a lot of $ on services at least for a few months or so. Usually cable tv that offered a 6-month discount.

I enjoyed paying $1.50/mo for YouTube premium by signing up with a VPN to Turkey 🇹🇷 but that’s not a thing anymore 😢