I was a sever at a…fine, chain restaurant, in the early 2010s. Life was good, the job was okay, and the security was lacking.
The local grocer had a promo where if you bought retailer gift cards, you got 10¢ of a gallon of gas for every $50 you spent. The chain I worked at was one of the companies.
I started small, bought a few $25 ones for my job, and used them on the cash sales. Easy. Cheaper gas. No red flags.
Then, I got bold. It was November, and Christmas was around the corner. We were going to run a promotion, if you buy $100 in gift cards, you got 4x $5 bonus cards. I was like “hmm, that’s a 20% return” and had a plan.
Then, the plan went bonkers. They announced that on Black Friday, we were doing a double bonus. $40 for $100.
The game: on. I ran some numbers, and figured why not go for the gold. I opened a new credit card, waited, and bought a ton. Then used other cards. And cash. In all, I got $5000 in gift cards and $2000 in extra. I just used them on all the cash sales I had and paid down the cards to zero.
I hit my sign up bonus on the credit card, got a free ticket to Germany, and had $2000 of cash to spend.
And yes, the chain eventually went under.
Moral: scam it when you can.
Comments
My idol.
Just for conversation…
Where I live, a supermarket had a conversion of their purchase points which could be changed for discounts on airline tickets. They also ran occasional points bonus promos.
Guy I worked with did some calculations, went out and bought huge amounts of rice, beans, pasta and suchlike: basically anything with a long shelf life. These he brought into work and resold at about 80% of the standard cost.
The numbers must have worked out well because he was getting cheap flights to Germany and he’d rinse and repeat every time they had an extra points offer.
Impressive.
I see no problem here. Stealing from large corporations is morally correct.
10/10
I’m not sure I understand what you did. Can you explain it to me like I’m five?
It wasn’t a scam. You didn’t steal or cheat. You took advantage of someone who wasn’t good at math by following the rules they made.
Check out the movie “Jerry & Marge Go Large“. It is basically a similar (true) story where a guy notices a glitch in the math for a particular lottery game and he, and subsequently his entire community, exploited it legally for massive gains.
I don’t think this is a scam lol
Gray area here, but I don’t think it’s a scam and you technically didn’t steal from the job.
You make America proud
One year a discount chain gave out $10 gift cards for every $50 purchase. Someone I know bought expensive earrings, then thought better of it (quality is crap!) and returned them. But they didn’t have a mechanism for clawing back the gift cards! So he bought a couple of suede coats and returned them. Eventually had a nice pile of Christmas cash to spend at … discount chain.
Honestly, this is one of the least concession-worthy ones I’ve heard. I don’t think that’s even.. it’s sort of just a technicality.
Maybe they liked the increase front-end cash from the purchased gift cards? Who knows, you could’ve been like helping their cashflow temporarily.
There was a great hack on Amex similar to this years ago. You got a point for every dollar spent on your Amex card. And you could buy Amex travelers checks for no fee with your Amex card. Buy $10000 in checks, use them to pay off your card. Lather, rinse, repeat. Spend points on airline tickets and hotels. Collect points for spending on airline and hotel. Do this every month for a year or two. Poof. Hundreds of thousands of airline miles, hotel points, and Amex points to spend on almost anything.
You didn’t scam anyone. You’re just smart. Good job.
I remember a story in the news a few years back about a guy who bought thousands of special edition minted coins with a travel points credit card. Used the transactions to collect the reward points and then used the coins to pay off the card balance. He did this over and over and accumulated a huge amount of reward points until someone realized and closed that loophole. I don’t remember the details of how it got shit down exactly but the guy did pretty week for awhile
u deadass gamed the whole system like it was a personal hustle simulator. like the math was mathing and the timing?? perfect. honestly the chain going under makes it feel less bad but if they hadn’t… idk man. i’d be sweating 4 life lookin over my shoulder. u got lucky asf but i can’t even hate.
the perfect crime—using gift cards to fund your European vacation while simultaneously sending your employer into financial oblivion. Who needs ethics when you’ve got a credit card and a cunning plan, right? Totally not shady at all.
I did something somewhat similar. There was a birthday coupon that had a value half off everyone at the tables meal up to 6. When people paid cash I’d use a coupon, the same one in fact just a copy because they never verified it, and got half off the dinner and pocketed the cash. Made a lot of money like that. 2 people I did it with got caught eventually and I came out unscathed by luck. They just got fired so no big deal.
I don’t understand the gas discount. You buy a $50 dollar gift card and they give you ten cents off one gallon or every gallon during one fill up? Or what?
My life philosophy “scam it when you can”
Well done and respect 🫡
I would not call it a scam since no one lost anything. However, I am amazed that the restaurant let you do the gift cards for that long without catching on.
When I was in high school I worked at a gas station, they had a promo where you get X cents per litre of fuel when you bought 2 red bull, small cans. They had some flavours not so popular, these were discounted, then discounted buy 1 get 1 free. I ended up with two cases of redbull and a full tank of gas for less than half of what it would have taken to fill up my car.
Many years ago here in Australia(30?) Amex ran a competition where if you convinced 10 people to sign up for an Amex card (cost $50 each) you won an all expenses paid trip to Europe. Workmate did it, offering to pay the $50 for everyone who signed up. For $500 he got a trip worth about $5000. Of course, the 10 people never used their new Amex cards. A lot of people did this, prompting Amex to stop the promotion pretty quickly. I guess someone in marketing didn’t get a bonus that year.
Okay but europe is a whole continent with different cultures and biomes. So where?
For every system, there are bugs. These bugs are not malicious in nature, they just exist. And they are an opportunity to improove the system.
Thank you for being a bug.
I don’t understand. You worked at a fine restaurant chain and a separate business, the grocer, ran the gift card offer.
Why did the restaurant you worked at accept the grocers gift cards?
I don’t quite get this. Did you use the gift cards to pay for customers who had paid YOU in cash? This is so obtuse to me. What does the grocer have to do with it? How does a US server find 5K to ‘invest’ in anything?
Oh, that was the moral? 😂😂😂
Got it
🤣
I had something similar going with my Amazon credit card in the UK (now discontinued)
For every £1000 you spent on it you’d get a £10 Amazon voucher gift card.
So I upped my limit to £7k and used the card to pay money into my flexible isa with Vanguard.
They wouldn’t initially accept the payment because it was a credit card but I also used a CURVE card (which is basically a debit card which ‘fronts’ all your other credit cards as a single card, very popular before Applepay!)
So now vanguard sees debit card and accepts it, then curve takes the money from my fronted Amazon Mastercard and then I withdrew the money from my flexible ISA at the end of the month to my regular bank account to repay the Amazon card in full.
Every month I did this for over a year, £70 of vouchers every month, plus the £7k money in my ISA for 20days each month made me a decent amount of interest!
Anyway, the stopped allowing it after a while and then Amazon stopped its credit card too.
Good while it lasted though!!!
Shameful
That’s not scamming. That’s logic. You did nothing wrong.
I worked at a higher end flower shop for 2 years and did a similar scam. The city I lived in briefly had this weird app called BUNZ where people could collect BUNZ at the value of 1000 BUNZ = 1$. You could get BUNZ by “selling” items on the app, signing other people up for the app and by doing surveys. You could use BUNZ to shop at local stores, get coffee and meals, etc. I collected tonnes of BUNZ by selling stuff and doing surveys. (I was very low income at the time and it was a great way for me to have some luxuries).
The store where I worked signed up to be one of the places that accepted BUNZ as payment. We had some regular customers who were servers and always paid cash. When they would come in, I would run their sale (let’s say 100$) in cash. After they left I would cancel the sale and run it again, paying for it with my 15% employee discount in BUNZ). I’d get 100$ cash for 85$ worth of BUNZ. I didn’t do it too often, maybe 3 or 4 times a week, but it was a big help at the time!
Snitch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion?wprov=sfla1
Pepsi and the Harrier jet
Crazy enough, I kinda did something similar as a teen while working at an amusement park. They implemented a Dave and Busters system for all the games that year, and whenever customers paid in cash to game, we were supposed to swipe a game card we were given each day and type in the amount of cash. I thought that was super sus and realized, I didn’t need to swipe every single time, and I could get past the end of day search(also sus) by putting the money in my socks.
It started with me paying for my lunches but grew much,much larger. Any time a customer paid for $20 or more worth of games, I’d set the cash aside and just not swipe my card. I was always attentive, reliable, and respectful, and picked up every shift I possibly could, so my bosses liked me and never suspected a thing. Tallied almost $4000 that summer, and my biggest haul in one day was around $600 working the Water Gun Race booth.
Fuck that place tho, we’d have like one god damn fan for every 3 games in some of the booths, and no fans in most of the others, in the middle of Midwest summer. It was fun though
Its not a scam at all man . Don’t feel bad . Keep innovating legally .
Idk if it’s hilarious how hard it is for people to grasp how this worked, or if that’s the whole reason it worked: because no one understands it. The only entity losing out is the restaurant with having to pay some extra credit card processing fees. I would be a bit worried to try this anymore though, especially at a chain. If I was a restaurant manager, and I would find it odd if you had alot more credit cards than everyone else. Even if it’s not stealing, per se, chains wouldn’t like someone manipulating the cash out process, especially if, like in my state, tips recorded on credit cards are taxable income.
r/churning would like this
Cashier arbitrage
I wish I could pull something like this off
My favorite country, Europe. Let me guess, Germany is the city? Or the state?