Loopholes you've found

[ColdCottage]

A video on this just came up on Reddit and I thought I bet MN will have loads to share. I can't think of any myself at the moment but I am sure some with come to me.

I especially love a good freebie so I'm sure I must have found some in that area before.

There must be loads...

Here is the post which inspired this post. fb.watch/3PY7VOHvZn/

Not me personally, but I do know of a small development of four houses on the edge of a village whose occupiers have been wired up to the national grid for about 15 years but have never received a bill.

Wow. That's a crazy loophole. That's tens of thousands between them easily.

McDonald's receipt. Write in any 6 digits to get big mac meal @ 1.99 without having to do the online survey

That's a good tip.

Not a loop hole but I used to always check the lockers at the pool for people who forgot to collect their 20p or £1 as a child. Used it for sweets.

@ColdCottage

Not a loop hole but I used to always check the lockers at the pool for people who forgot to collect their 20p or £1 as a child. Used it for sweets.

I did the same with phone boxes. A wander up and down the high street with pals checking the phone boxes could add up to enough money for some penny sweets or an ice cream.

You can travel using an Oyster from some stations for less than the official fare if you take the penalty fare for not touching in.

@ClaudiaWankleman that seems bonkers. Good tip

About 15 years ago I subscribed to a telecom company where, if you dialled a four figure code before the number, it was charged through that company instead of BT. I have relatives in Australia so it was great, would pay £1.50 for an hour long phone call that would cost £30 - £40 through BT. I would get a paper bill for the minuscule amount.

I did this for years, just for the international calls. Then one day it occurred to me I hadn't had a bill for ages. I called one more time and this time made a note of the date, and waited. Nope - no bill. I googled the company, I thought I would be honest and offer to pay but the only results were people moaning how crap they were and there were no contact details.

Readers, as I am so honest, I didn't use them any more but I could have got free phone calls to Australia for LONG time had I wanted.

@BalloonSlayer that's awesome. I think I recall my parents using a similar scheme but no such luck as free calls.

At school if you put 2x2p pieces wrapped in foil in the vending machine it would register them as 20p!
The boy that told me that is literally now in prison!

😂

My sister didn’t get a gas bill for all of the years she lived in her last house. She had gas but the National Grid was adamant that she didn’t and therefore couldn’t pay for it.

I used to buy reduced items at our local co-op - and of they had multibuy offers, those still applied - so sometimes I would get more money off than I paid for the items. Sadly they figured out how to stop that happening.

Tesco had a 'double the difference' policy regarding overcharges. When an XBox game that I was buying for my son was released, they had an offer that I believe was supposed to be buy the game £45, get another Xbox thing free half-price, I think it was Xbox Live £18. But some of the offer tickets were wrong - and said buy the other thing and get the game half-price. So I did just that - and got no discount at the till. So I went to the customer service desk. And they gave me back £54. Bargain!

(figures are approximate)

I was buying batteries in a supermarket- they had an offer on them: it was £10 to buy one pack, but the offer was 2 packs for £8 (for both).

@ImNotMeImSomeoneElse I remember that. I kicked myself for corrected the checkout person over an error which a double refund of the over charge would have been around £42!

Not me, but before supermarkets worked out how to over-ride multibuy offers when the items were reduced for quick sale, I saw someone buy about forty mangoes that were officially £1.50 each or two for £2.00, but knocked down to 20p each. I know the offer worked as the other shopper hadn't taken all of them, so I picked up four, and got a refund in my receipt of £1.00, for a purchase that actually only cost me 80p. So they paid me 20p to take the mangoes away.

@QueenOfLabradors I think that is how Waitrose caught on. Too many people buying this sort of bargain without any other shopping so the till actually told the cashier to give the customer money back. Happened to my mum.

My two good 'deals' (loopholes) in the distant past:

Terrys Chocolate Oranges for 36p each, thanks to overlapping offers in Tesco

Kitchen knives that were going through till for the amount they should have been 'off' the normal price (think £15 knife, £3 off, should be £12 but going through the till as £3)

I didn't pay my mobile phone company any money for texts or data for about 3 years.

Signed up for a PAYG tariff that gave me free texts and free data for 1 month every time I topped up £10. So every month I topped up £10 and the donated it straight to women's aid by text. So Women's aid got £120 per year and O2 only got the cost of a very occasional phone call.

Only quite when the data allowance became too small for what I needed.

I ordered a fabric sample from Next. These are free delivery. Then the usually message pops up to say if you order something else within 30 minutes, there is no extra delivery charge. So basically, if you want to order a skirt/dress/trousers or whatever, order a fabric sample first. Then ten minutes later order the item you want, and there is no delivery charge.

Sometimes discount codes for websites work on other sites too. I think it’s because they are different sites for the same company and therefore actually just the same business. I was shopping around for something a few months ago and noticed the stock levels were exactly the same on 2 different sites. The discount code from one site worked on the other site too.

Years ago I didn’t get an electric bill for about 4 years
I was was on a key meter which had about £70 on it and it didn’t take anything off apart from about £1 a month
Almost 4 years went by before they realised that the house hadn’t been billed
Plus I have big gates on my drive so they couldn’t get to the meter to read it .
Eventually we got a new meter but i said I was a new tenant so never got billed for it
Price of electric is shocking 😂

@Tinkerbellflowers thankyou for this! I've had a next bedding set in my basket and now have bought it with free delivery 😊💕

@ShinyHatStand I ♥️ this! All to a good cause too. Genius.