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The Engineer Who converted 12,100 Cups Of Pudding to 1.25 Million Air Miles
- raleec 13y agoThis occurred in 1999, but it is still impressive!
- rytis 13y agoI wonder if the companies are more careful these days?
- kitcar 13y agoI've worked on a few loyalty programs of Forbes-500 type companies, and the short answer is yes, definitely. I clearly remember one company actively monitoring points collection to identify outliers (i.e. people who went through the trash collecting barcodes for points, etc..) to ensure they weren't becoming unprofitable program members. If the person crossed that threshold, the program would take actions to slow down or limit their redemption (i.e. limit the number of points redemptions which one account can do in one 24 hour period, etc...). They usually wouldn't kick the person out of the program as that action had the potential to generate bad press, and it was usually relatively easy for the person to just sign up again using different information. Limits, on the other hand, actually limited or prevented the "abuse" activity without hurting the "good" program members. BTW, my favorite part from the article: David approached the local Salvation Army with an offer; if they gave him a bunch of volunteers to peel off all the bar codes on his pudding, he’d donate the pudding to them. But here’s the beautiful part, doing this counted as a considerable charitable donation, which let David claim just over $800 back in tax deductions at the end of they year.
- Nicholas_C 13y agoI work with a guy who obsesses over air miles. This year he took his family to Europe for free (including hotels). So it is still doable, but it takes a lot of work. He has about 20 credit cards and is constantly cancelling and applying for new cards. I would argue that my coworker is probably spending way too much time and if you take into account opportunity costs it probably isn't worth it for him. But I suppose if he enjoys it and sees it as a hobby, why not?
- pm90 13y agoI would say that a lot of the financial business does something similar; exploit a loophole to make a windfall[0]. The benefits your friend gets might or might not be worth the time, but my ideas about this are pretty much: you shouldn't take from the system more than you put in. A lot of people work to make this well oiled machine work the way it does; and if you don't do something productive, you're kinda just leeching off it. [0]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2773265/Billionaire-who-broke-the-Bank-of-England.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2773265/Billionaire-who-b...
- comrade1 13y agounfortunately he has to fly on American.
- kleiba 13y agoThis made it into the plot of Paul Thomas Anderson's movie "Punch-Drunk Love", starring Adam Sandler (2002). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch-Drunk_Love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch-Drunk_Love
- bradleyland 13y agoThis was the first (maybe only) Adam Sandler movie where I felt like his unique blend of quirky, quiet persona played very well in to the character. It's worth a watch.
- shacharz 13y agoA lesson on determination I guess, I probably would have just thought, "meh that's too much to bother".
- sambeau 13y agoMacKeeper popup. Will not read.
- daemonfire300 13y agoI am suprised, MacKeeper has a bad "Web of Trust" rating.
- fc2 13y agoYou're missing out, it's hilarious. Oh, and get adblock.
- pests 13y agoYou must miss out on a lot of the internet.
- lusr 13y agoHere's a guy who pretty much did it for free (and he wasn't the only one): http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/02/28/credit-card-reward-points-airline-miles-free/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/02/28/credit-card-reward-po...
- apaprocki 13y agoThey quickly banned buying coins and money after figuring this out, but the program still had many aspects which allowed quick multiplication of rewards, bonuses, etc. I also achieved 1mln miles using the Starwood card and just made it before my airline decided to no longer allow CC earned miles to count towards lifetime status.
- aaron695 13y agoHow was it tax deductible since he essentially was keeping all the value of the product? I can't buy a stack of cars and then donate a ashtray to the Salvation Army and claim the car back?
- lusr 13y agoHe donated the product and kept the barcode.
- rschmitty 13y agoHe purchased pudding and donated pudding. If you want to buy a stack of cars, keep the invoice papers and donate the car feel free
- aaron695 13y agoNo, that's why it was at the Salvo's in the first place he was getting them to peel off the thing of value he bought, bar codes that give flyers miles.
- nmeofthestate 13y agoThe pudding was the same price before and after the promotion, so the barcode was worth zero cents. He claimed back tax on the non-barcode value.
- aaron695 13y agoIt's a bit a stretch that any judge/anyone would believe that he was buying pudding. Or that he went to all that effort to keep something of zero value.
- nmeofthestate 13y agoIn the UK, any promotional 'tokens' like this have to have a monetary value on them - normally it's something like 0.0001p. IANAL but perhaps this minute monetary value is the legal value (i.e. effectively nothing)?
- ukoki 13y agoFor a couple more examples of "beating the system", This American Life did a great episode on loopholes last year: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/473/loopholes http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/473/l...
- jpatokal 13y agoThis one is particularly epic: http://www.propublica.org/article/death-takes-a-policy-how-a-lawyer-exploited-the-fine-print http://www.propublica.org/article/death-takes-a-policy-how-a...
- kbenson 13y agoThat's a great article. I find it really troubling how the insurance agencies responded. He may or may not be responsible for the criminal charges regarding fraud, but those should be considered separately from the contractual loopholes he legally exploited, since none of those allegations are required to have been true for his idea to work.
- jpatokal 13y agoHere's the guy's story in his own words, including some rather amazing pictures of the loot: http://www.flyertalk.com/pudding.htm http://www.flyertalk.com/pudding.htm
- logn 13y agoA similar (but failed) attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
- ekianjo 13y agoEven if you have miles you still have to pay for the airport taxes and stuff like that which amounts to 50 percent of the full ticket price anyway.
- corbet 13y agoIn which country? That's never been my experience. I've hauled my family from the US to Europe and back for $5/head + miles...
- swalberg 13y agoIt's that way in Canada. Both Aeroplan and AirMiles make you pay taxes and fees. Depending on which airports you cross that's probably $50-$75 a head each way.
- pedrocr 13y agoThis has been my experience in Europe with Star Alliance. By the time you pay all the fees you're paying the same as in a low cost airline.
- yitchelle 13y agoThe taxes really depend on the airport involves during the flight. On a recent return flight from Dusseldorf->London Heathrow->Dubai->Melbourne, on FF points, the tax was 1/3 cost of the full price tickets, (around 450EUR). Airport taxes in US must be quite low, relatively.
- saryant 13y agoThis is only a major issue if you fly a premium cabin out of the UK. Elsewhere the taxes are minimal. In college I racked up 135k United miles through credit cards and then used them for a first class ticket to Thailand and Singapore after graduation. The taxes came out to less than $100.
- shin_lao 13y agoDepends on your status. When you have elite status they pay the tax for you.
- LinaLauneBaer 13y agoThis reminds me of a story: For a certain time in recent theory you were able to legally "print money": A couple of years ago when Germany got the Euro currency there were put a few regulations in place for the banks. If you came to them with 100 Deutsch Marks in your hands (old currency) they had to convert the 100 Deutsch Marks to euro by using the ratio 1:1.95583. The banks had to round up if needed. So in theory you could give them 1 Pfennig ( = 1/100 of 1 Deutsch Mark) and demand that they exchange that to Euro. If you do the math 1 Pfennig ~= 0.5 Euro Cent. Since the banks had to round up you ended up with 1 Euro Cent. That is a 100% return of investment. Now in theory you would have to give your bank 50 million 1 Pfennig coins (separately) and you would have gotten back 100 million euro cents = 1 million euros. But you would have only invested only 0.5 million euros. And so on… I am not sure if this is an urban legend. It was told to me when I was a kid.
- yannickmahe 13y agoWouldn't that mean you'd have to give each Pfennig individually? Otherwise, they'd just round the whole sum.
- LinaLauneBaer 13y agoYes. :) you would have to give your bank 50 million 1 Pfennig coins (*separately*)
- m_mueller 13y agoThis thread reminds me of this episode[1] more and more.. [1] http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120914205337/seinfeld/images/3/30/The_bottle_deposit.jpg http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120914205337/seinfel...
- LinaLauneBaer 13y agoI don't get that reference. Care to explain?
- atdrummond 13y agoUnfortunately, people like this are also the reason frequent flier programs have become heavily devalued over the past two decades. While this isn't probably as egregious as manufactured spending for credit card points (to later be converted into airline miles), his family (and others like him) are taking free seats and upgrades from frequent fliers who have actually earned their miles from BIS (butt-in-seat) flying over the years. And they're not even generating any useful amount of revenue for the airline.
- drharris 13y agoSame can be said of startups. There are people who get lucky off of an incredibly simple/clever concept that has little actual value (instagram?), while many other teams fail while toiling away on difficult problems that could be world-changing. It's not fair, but it happens, and often.
- vidarh 13y agoThat may be so, but the only people truly to blame are the airlines who didn't pay proper attention to how they structured these rewards.
- atdrummond 13y agoAbsolutely agreed there. There were plenty of people who warned AA about this abuse once the HC promotion (and subsequent Kellogg's promotions) were launched. At the very least they learned not to provide EQM (miles that qualify for status) in such promotions; now, it is only possible to earn up to 10k EQM in any given year on a $450/annual fee credit card. Even that only gets one 40% of the way to Gold. Honestly not sure that anyone at AA thought this one through.
- ubernostrum 13y agoWell... First of all, the fact that this promotion earned miles which could qualify for some type of frequent-flyer status (elite-qualifying miles, or EQMs, to use the jargon) was basically the dumbest thing ever. And EQMs these days are difficult to come by through means other than actually buying a ticket and getting on the plane; typically, only promotions which will actually earn money for the airline can earn EQMs, and even those will have strict caps on them (I have a US Airways club membership and credit card, for example, and IIRC I can't pick up more than about 15k EQMs/year from the combination of them). That by itself gives a lot more flexibility in dealing with "abuse" of promotions, since non-qualifying miles are only useful to be redeemed for travel. And there are endless ways to cap that: * Blackout dates to avoid too many "free" seats during peak paid-travel times of the year. * Dynamic fare-bucket management, allowing the number of redeemable seats on any given flight to be adjusted up or down on the fly, along with confusing schedules for when the mileage-redeemable fare classes open for booking. * Limiting availability of redeemable seats on alliance partners, making it impractical or impossible to plan longer itineraries as mileage awards. * Fees for mileage redemption, ranging from simple processing fees up to things like British Airways' stupendous "fuel surcharge" (which can make a "free" business- or first-class ticket cost roughly as much actual cash as a fully-paid economy-class fare). etc., etc. And the trend now is toward revenue-based status programs, where qualifying for frequent-flyer status requires not just a minimum number of miles but also a certain minimum number of actual dollars spent, on that specific airline's flights. That eliminates the more lucrative type of mileage-run since low-cost but high-mileage itineraries no longer help with reaching status. More generally, though, I think the airlines have moved toward no longer considering "frequent flyers" as important as they once did. Frequent business travelers are relevant, of course, but the strong preference is for the types of folks whose corporate travel department just pays the fare the airline asks for, rather than people who spend hours on travel-search sites trying to find the optimal combo of high mileage/low fare.
- bluedevil2k 13y agoThey say that 1.25 million air miles allow him to travel free, implying he can do it forever. But, at 60,000 miles for a flight from the US to Asia, and a family of 4, you can burn through the miles in 2 years.
- drharris 13y agoThe article mentions that he keeps earning more miles by paying attention to every promotion out there, and has over 4 million now. I also wouldn't be going straight from US to Asia; I'd be hopping locations gradually for an extended vacation to get the most out of the miles.
- whafro 13y agoMy story isn't nearly as extreme, but I'm still pretty proud of it. Three years ago, there was a LivingSocial deal with a headline to the effect of "$10,000 for one night in the SF Fairmont Penthouse Suite." In a moment of "who would buy this?!," I of course read the whole thing, and the offering was impressive -- it included monogrammed Tiffany table settings for 20 or something, and the suite had a helipad accessible via bookcase-door -- but nothing I'd ever spend my money on. At the bottom of the blurb, LS mentioned an alternative offer -- "$2000 for a night in the Presidential Suite." In reading that, the last bullet point read "plus Fairmont Platinum Status for Life." Now that, I thought, might actually be a good deal. Fairmont Platinum gives you a night free, 10 nights of suite upgrades, 10 nights of room upgrades, $100 in spa/dining certificates, and a few other things each year. I'm a young guy, so the math is fairly compelling when you add this up over a lifetime. So I redeemed the deal and posted the opportunity on the frequent flyer forums for Fairmont, where many of Fairmont's best customers lurk, and they quickly snapped up dozens of the deals, leading to Fairmont/LivingSocial putting a freeze on it. Apparently the "for life" bit had been an error, and they meant "for one year." But now they had some of their best customers, people who often earned their Platinum status anyway, encouraging them to honor it. After taking a weekend to think it over, Fairmont decided to honor the deal, and I've been a Fairmont Plat ever since. I used the actual night in the suite to throw a surprise engagement party, and it was pretty amazing. Since then, my wife and I have stayed in suites on the cheap in Sonoma, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and we actually spent 5 nights in an oceanfront suite on Hawaii for $129/night (the AAA rate for the suite was $1200/night). And we get lots of nice perks along the way. Like I said, it's no 4MM miles for $4000, but for doing next to no work, it'll be a nice perk that my family and I will hopefully take advantage of for decades to come.
- skrebbel 13y agoCool that Fairmont stuck with the erroneous promise. It would've been easy for them to say no and "well, sue us if you dare!" you, without any significant loss-of-sales effect on the bottom of their end-of-year Excel sheets. Implies some long-term thinking or just plain decency (which I wager are the same thing).
- 13y ago
- robmcm 13y agoThat's a big risk, I'm surprised the company didn't find some loop hole, or simply lose his entry. There must have been a lot of times during this that he though, "this is never actually going to work". Fair play to him though.
- raleec 13y agoapparently, they tried.. : "I became doubly worried when they failed to send me the miles on time ... saying they had no record of my order! This seems pretty incredible given that I mailed the package registered and someone on their end signed for the package... Thankfully, I made copies of everything, and took photographs just in case. When I sent them proof, they quickly sent me the miles."
- outworlder 13y agoI think this guy should apply to YCombinator. In particular, there's a question about the time where you have "hacked" the system, or something to that effect.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hudibras 13y agoI wonder how much having the word "engineer" in the title helped in getting this to the front page...
- hawkharris 13y agoIf you enjoyed the pudding scheme, you'll get a kick out of these related exploits: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/473/loopholes http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/473/l...
- gnoway 13y agoSo, he took advantage of a promotion in a way the manufacturer did not intend, lied to grocery store employees to explain why he was depriving hundreds of other customers of delicious pudding while concurrently ruining pudding as a treat for his children, and caused his wife to physically harm herself peeling product codes from plastic packaging which he then I guess sent to a single landfill? Just so he could travel for free? And we're lauding this accomplishment?
- lkozma 13y ago... took advantage of ... in a way ... did not intend ... At least this first part seems close to most definitions of hacking I know.
- gnoway 13y agoA promotion, not a device. It's different. Anyway the intent was more sarcasm than anything, but I guess I'll take the karma hit.
- kamjam 13y agoIt made me laugh too, and I got the sarc, but I think it's the last bit which really killed the karma... And we're lauding this accomplishment? Or maybe add a </sarc> next time just to make it clear for everyone :)
- fc2 13y agoIf it was indeed sarcasm then it was too subtle for HN. I mean if you had posted that on 4chan then it would be blatant sarcasm, but people on HN take themselves a little to seriously so it's a lot harder to tell.
- ondiekijunior 13y agoI like the hacker mentality of interpretation
- tedsanders 13y agoTo me, hacking a device is quite different than hacking a promotion. When you hack a device, there's usually no victim. However, when you hack a commercial transaction, there typically is a victim because most transactions are zero-sum (or at least the transaction surplus is zero-sum).
- andykellr 13y agoThe typical redemption estimate of a mile is 1 cent. Often $250 tickets are 25,000 miles, $500 tickets are 50,000 miles, etc. When you find a $1000 ticket for 25,000 use miles. I've seen $600 tickets for 125,000 miles. That's a bad use of miles. Many credit cards give you about 1% bonus (points, miles, whatever) and miles cards give you a mile per dollar spent. 1% of a dollar is 1 cent. So this math makes sense. He got 1000 miles for 2.50. If each mile is worth 1 cent, that's a 4x benefit. Great, but not amazing. He got a tax deduction too, so maybe it was a 5-6x benefit. Sounds like a bit of a hassle, but the other perks sound great. Anyway, the article should say $15,000 worth of miles. The airline might sell them to you for $150,000 but that's why you should never buy miles unless there's a tiny gap in what you have/need for a flight. For example, United will sell you 50,000 miles for $1881.25 which you can then redeem for a ~$500 ticket and not earn miles on that flight.
- nathanbarry 13y agoIf you redeem these miles for high value flights (international first or business class) you will get much, much better than $0.01 per mile.
- jcampbell1 13y agoReaching a gold status for life is worth more than the miles alone. You pretty much always fly first class for free, and you get 2-5x miles on every flight. Also, all tickets effectively become like full fare tickets. Want to extend a trip by a few days? Just call the number and it will be taken care of. He now has 4M miles, by taking advantage of the status.
- nohuck13 13y agoAmerican Airlines gold status (the lowest frequent flyer status level) is not actually that generous. It's basically priority boarding, a little bit of priority on the upgrade queue (if you want to pay for the upgrade with upgrade vouchers or cash), and that's about it. Lounge access doesn't even come until platinum, one level above gold, and then only on international flights. I'm sure he makes lots of good things happen by paying for them with his copious of miles, but it's not from the gold status :) https://www.aa.com/i18n/AAdvantage/eliteStatus/elite-benefits-chart.jsp https://www.aa.com/i18n/AAdvantage/eliteStatus/elite-benefit...
- jvanderwal 13y agoMy friends and I got a few round trip plane tickets once. Wendy's had a deal where their largest drinks had coupons to cut off their sides. I think 60 coupons got you a one-way domestic ticket on AirTran and 120 got you round trip. We were kids so we went dumpster diving at a couple local restaurants, found hundreds and hundreds of cups, and walked away with 3 or 4 round trip tickets. Not nearly as amazing as 1.25 million air miles, but we were pretty proud of ourselves.
- joonix 13y agoThat's your own blog, I feel you should disclose that because the tone of your post makes it appear as if you're just a reader. And reading that blog doesn't equal 1.25 million miles. I'd like to know what strategies you used.
- maneesh 13y agoI earned 1.25 million miles easily at http://hackthesystem.com http://hackthesystem.com using credit card bonus tricks. It'll last me maybe 5 years economy, 2.5 years business class --- but I fly every couple weeks. The real benefit is the hotels, biz class, upgrades, amazon GCs, and more.
- knite 13y agoNote: Maneesh runs the site he's promoting. See his submission history: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=maneesh https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=maneesh
- skrebbel 13y agoThe thing that surprised me most about this story is that there's a brand of chocolate pudding called "Healthy Choice".
- maxerickson 13y agoReally there is a brand called "Healthy Choice" that markets chocolate pudding. It's only sort of the same thing...
- dlhavema 13y agostill the original thought exists "how is chocolate pudding a 'Healthy Choice'?"
- maxerickson 13y agoSure. What I was getting at is that they don't care, they are using the name to sell things, not making a promise. And they probably sort of deliver, I bet they put fiber and 'mouth feel' agents in it that make it have a lot less calories (there are some hand wavy arguments against food science products, but I bet for lots of people that slight risk is a good trade off for the calories).
- oftenwrong 13y agohttp://www.amazon.com/Back-Nature-Macaroni-Cheese-Cups/dp/B0034KQQJC/ref=sr_1_1?s=grocery&ie=UTF8&qid=1379545392&sr=1-1&keywords=back+to+nature+macaroni+and+cheese+cups http://www.amazon.com/Back-Nature-Macaroni-Cheese-Cups/dp/B0...
- reuven 13y agoMy favorite story of this sort happened a few years ago: The US has never been successful at getting the public to accept dollar coins. As a result, the dollar coins -- some with presidents on them, and some with Sacajawea depicted -- were sitting in the US Mint's warehouses. The Mint, in order to get rid of these coins, offered people the chance to (a) order them by mail, (b) have them delivered for free, and (c) pay for them on a credit card. Some people (very cleverly) did the math, and ordered ridiculous numbers of dollar coins on their airline-affiliated credit cards. When the dollar coins would arrive, the buyers would take them back to their bank, depositing the money in their account. In other words, these people were getting thousands of dollars' worth of frequent flyer miles each week, for absolutely free. The Mint found out about this when banks started sending them enormous numbers of dollar coins, unopened, for storage, and that a very small number of customers were ordering a very large number of dollar coins. The full (and very entertaining) story was done by NPR's Planet Money podcast: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/13/137795995/how-frequent-fliers-exploit-a-government-program-to-get-free-trips http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/13/137795995/how-freq...
- darkarmani 13y agoIt was a PITA to get banks to accept large amounts of coins. I had a coworker that was doing this, but he had to keep switching banks -- most would let him do it once for free.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago> Some people (very cleverly) did the math, and ordered ridiculous numbers of dollar coins on their airline-affiliated credit cards. When the dollar coins would arrive, the buyers would take them back to their bank, depositing the money in their account. Effectively, this works around the usual restrictions on using credit cards for cash advances. Even if you just had a standard cash-back credit card (1-2% on purchases), you could make a huge reward without actually spending any money, and on top of that you'd be able to get a month's worth of cash advance up to your credit limit; you could make a significant amount on the float that way. However, most credit cards have fine print that explicitly excludes the direct purchase of negotiable financial instruments, so they'd have every right to cancel the rewards and charge a cash-advance fee if they found out.
- jrochkind1 13y agoWhen I was a child, there was some promotion with general mills cereal and free airline tickets for children. We had a basement full of a year's supply of cheerio's, because my parents calculated the amount of cereal they had to buy was still significantly cheaper than the ticket would have cost, at that point, for our yearly visit to the granparents in florida.
- BenoitEssiambre 13y agoI met a retired guy during a trip in Peru who was travelling the world using airmiles acquired by signing up with free credit cards. Credit card companies would offer a few hundred air miles when he signed up. He would then simply cancel the cards a month later. He said that often when he called to cancel cards, he would be offered additional air miles incentives to prevent him from cancelling. He would keep the card an additional month when that happened.
- driverdan 13y agoThat's very common. It's one of the first things travel hackers do when they get into it. Card signup bonuses are worth $500-1000 and generally require a minimum spend of $2000-5000. Not much effort for free money.
- ljoshua 13y agoI've read about this before. My primary question, however, is wouldn't this put some big dings in your credit rating? The average age of accounts would go way down, the credit checks would go up, and your allowed debt to income ratio would be all over the place. Or does none of that happen?
- WickyNilliams 13y agoIn some kind of strange coincidence I read about this exact story last night on Quora [1]. Perhaps someone else did too :) Anyway this is a fantastic story of a man gaming the system. In the Quora thread I've linked to there are some other fantastic examples. Particularly the ATM bug! I'd heard of that one before but just in case you hadn't... Cash points have a feature whereby if you don't take the dispensed cash within a time limit, they take the money back, and re-credit your account. However some affected ATMs did not count the cash on the way back in. Now the exploit should be obvious - take the majority of the cash carefully and allow the ATM to swallow the rest. The cash you've taken is yours and the money you were supposed to get goes back into your account. No doubt it would be easy to track down customer's who had been involved in this exploit, but it's a fun story nevertheless. [1] http://www.quora.com/Gaming-the-System/What-are-the-best-examples-of-people-cheating-the-system?share=1 http://www.quora.com/Gaming-the-System/What-are-the-best-exa...
- brazzy 13y agoI programmed ATMs some 10 years ago, and the way they worked was that retracted cash would not be recycled, but stored and tagged with the withdrawing account, which would get credited only after a manual counting (or maybe immediately, but counted and confirmed afterwards)
- andyjohnson0 13y agoThis reminded me of the Hoover free flights promotion [1] in the UK back in 1992. Hoover's UK division tried to clear excess stock by offering free air tickets for purchases of over £100. The promotion was so popular that Hoover was unable to supply the tickets to all the participants, resulting in years of legal actions. Hoover UK eventually admitted that the exercise had cost it £50 million. Three executive directors were dismissed and the business was sold to an Italian company. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion
- noelherrick 13y agoThere are still good deals available by using credit cards. My wife and I took several trips (and sent other people on trips) by using a British Airways Chase card and a Southwest card. We only had to fill out an application (no pudding cup peeling required). Nothing in comparison to this guy, but very doable.
- burgerz 13y agoVery risky, he was lucky the air miles program didn't hire a bunch of lawyers and get out of giving him anything.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ck2 13y agoThe way this story is retold on this particular site is horrible. I've read another account that was written far better and with far more detail. In fact this article just seems like a summary of the first article, skipping over details like he didn't first go with the pudding.
- awor 13y agoWhen i was a teenager, there was a deal where if you bought a box of cheerios, you got a pass to any Cineplex Odeon theatre. So for a few months, we would buy boxes of cheerios at walmart for <$3 and then go see a movie (~$8) and eat our cheerios out of the box in the theatre.