Hence why when people discover hidden loopholes, they will likely take advantage of them for as long as they can.
Even when these loopholes weren't entirely within the law.
Redditor mr-friskies was curious to hear about loopholes people made use of until they were finally closed up, leading them to ask:
"What’s that loophole/workaround you’ve been keeping a secret that you can now share because they patched/fixed it?"
"I was going thru chemo 5 years ago."
"I started running a fever, which meant an immediate drive to the emergency room."
"My partner couldn’t drive me so I parked in the deck."
"However, I ended up being admitted for a week before they could bring the fever down."
"A nurse told me on the day I was checking out to list the ticket as lost and the system would only charge me for 1 full day ($20) instead of 7 days."- bal_swing
"My company had a contest to help boost recruiting on LinkedIn."
"Grand prize was a cruise."
"We got points for various things."
"But what ended up actually mattering was the amount of new connections you gained - 1 point for each."
"We all started with like 100."
"The max was 30,000."
"I (with the help of my wife logged into my account) ended up winning with some 27,000 connections in the span of a few months."
"How?"
"Basically on the mobile app back then they would have a feed of '+connect' recommendations that would refresh/scroll infinitely."
"There was no limit to it."
"Every other UI for sending a connection request would hit a cap or you'd get emails accusing you of being a bot."
"And it turns out nobody on LinkedIn cares if they actually know you or what you say in a connection request (except a couple weird exceptions)."
"Most people just ignore it or say 'okay whatever sure' and accept."
"To this day I get so much recruiter spam because of how visible I am."
'And also the feed is like the dead Internet sloppiest of dead Internet slop."- PolyglotTV
"There used to be these phones at airports that were just a direct line to a rental car place."
"The thing is, the way old rotary phones used to work was actually hanging up and picking up real fast a certain number of times."
"If you picked up one of those phones and hung it up nine times real fast it would dial an outside line and you could use it like a normal phone."- funky_grandma
Calling Pick Up GIF by Sweet Charee Gallery Giphy
'I didn't pay for internet for years because you could renew those Comcast '1hr free internet' logins indefinitely with a MAC ID scrambler."- smallscrem
"Chipotle used to run a promo that gave you a free burrito with the purchase of a gift card."
"They allowed you to use a previously purchased gift card to purchase a new gift card so I would just use the same gift card every time to get a free burrito for the duration of the promo."- almostZoidberg
"In college, you had to buy a parking pass if you wanted to be able to have your car on campus."
"The pass was a sticker that you put on the back driver side window, and it was pretty expensive for the full year!"
"There was one year where I knew that for the 2nd half of the year, I wasn't going to be on campus much because of an internship."
"The school also sold parking passes that were good for one semester, instead of the full year, so I bought that instead."
"What I realized is that the full-year parking pass and the semester parking pass looked exactly the same, except for one small difference: the semester pass had an expiration date in the corner whereas the full-year pass had that date punched out (like with a hole puncher)."
"So naturally, for the next 2 years, I'd buy the semester parking pass and just put a hole punch through the expiration date and saved hundreds of dollars on parking!"- kaypress
Car Pictogram GIF by Zugspitz Region Giphy
"Back when the Coke rewards were a thing, I used to enter the sweepstakes for the small rewards like $50 - $100 gift cards."
"Everyone else spent their codes on the high-end sweepstakes or direct gift cards or extra Coke beverages."
"I, on average, won one a month or more for many years."- darknight7884
"Early nineties university parking passes had scratch-off dates."
"You bought it, scratched off the month, and in theory, you could only use it for that month."
"I got a silver paint pen and just filled them in as I went along."
"My teenage self was stoked to save on 11 months of permits per year."
"This caught on and they changed the permits a couple years later."- sombrerogalaxy
"10 years ago, I would visit my girlfriend at her college."
"The parking garage was $25 for overnight parking."
"I found out after getting a flat tire that the parking ticket for leaving my car on the street overnight was only $10."
"Probably saved $500 from this."- Fallacies_TE
Star Trek Bill GIF by Goldmaster Giphy
"Back in the day Netzero dialup's free version that had ads and time limits had really crappy programming to know it was free.'
"After the line connected while it was handshaking it would launch an exe that checked the version and ran the timer and ads if it was the free one."
"You could just write a batch file to transfer the exe out of the directory to a different folder and it would blissfully ignore that there was an entire freaking missing exe and just connect with no ads or time limits."
"I can share now because I haven't had a modem for a good 25 years."- unwittyusername42
"Didn’t keep it a secret, but never shared on the internet."
'I’m a veteran, and years ago I was going through college getting my CS degree."
"The company I worked for had a program where they’d subsidize the purchase of a new computer with the caveat that the computer would double as my work machine."
"I decided to take advantage and get a new MacBook Pro."
"Apple offered both student and veteran discounts, but they aren’t suppose to stack."
"During the ordering process, I opened up the pricing of the computer I wanted in two separate browsers."
"In one, I applied the student discount."
"In the other, I applied the veteran discount."
"Upon observation of the URLs, one of them had a “//“ in it."
"The two URLs looked something like:"
"Website.com//studenDiscountParameters and:"
"Website.com/veteranDiscountParameters."
"So I combined the two."
"Website.com/veteranDiscountParameters/studentDiscountParameters."
"And it stacked the discounts."- MillCityRep
"Way back when, at my university in Toronto, the parking ticket machines would accept any cards you put in."
"Including old expired gift cards."
"I knew someone who would park, swipe an old Future Shop gift card and be out the door."- mybigfatreddit
Shark Week GIF by Bellabu Bear Giphy
"Relatively small, but my old job had to manually update prices for everything as sales went on."
"I noticed that Peppermint Patties were never changed to their original price, and made a habit of buying a few for 80% off every time I worked."
"Another from much later in life my job had an employee cafeteria that had fountain drinks, but there was no nightshift staff so drinks were just free at night!"- tbonehavoc
"Back in 2002/2003, there was a gas station by my apartment that had an atm that, with every transaction you made, you could possibly win a free 2-liter bottle of soda."
"My roommate and I, as poor as we were discovered when we were both checking our account balances that every balance inquiry won. We walked out with a few bottles that day and would hit it up once a week or so till I moved away."- dking484
"Up until a few months ago, there was a workaround that let you stream Netflix on a PS5 from outside the household by just opening the app through the recommendations instead of actually clicking the app."- AnythingGlum2469
Sony Ps5 GIF Giphy
If no one notices a loophole and it doesn't negatively affect anyone, it's hard to see any reason not to take advantage of it.
Remembering, of course, that all good things eventually must come to an end.
