Ask Lemmy

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.

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!

THCA

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.

ITT: fraud

lol

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

"Walmart rentals"

If you need a product for a project but can't afford it, go buy it at Walmart, use it, and when you're done return it. Their return policy is pretty no questions asked, especially if you have a receipt. I had a roommate do this with an iPad he needed for a semester in college. I think it was a 14 day return policy, so he'd back it up and take it back every 13 days, then just buy a new one and repeat until the semester was over.

Even if you don't have a receipt, actually. I've returned things I bought at Target to Walmart and gotten a refund. Granted, that was a few years ago.

Credit card manufactured spending. Still doable, but I think it's more difficult now.

You sign up for a fancy card with a fancy offer. Say, spend 6k in 3 months, get 1k in points.

Then you go to the local post office, and buy a money order for 6k. They used to be more permissive about letting you charge it on the CC, with only a nominal fee.

Then deposit that money order to your bank, use that money to pay off the charge for 6k. Boom, free signup bonus achieved.