Once upon a time a nerdy young boy in a Catholic high school was obsessed with airplanes. He started flying around the country collecting frequent flyer miles,

Once upon a time a nerdy young boy in a Catholic high school was obsessed with airplanes. He started flying around the country collecting frequent flyer miles, reporting small problems with the plane, and getting lots of $200 "apology" vouchers and stuff. It was fun. Today he has a big fan club, runs some airfare-hacker forums and gives interviews to magazines with no journalistic credibility or fact-checking whatsoever (cough cough). Airfare hacking today is harder than it used to be, and you can't even defraud the US Mint by ordering dollar coins on your credit card (with no fee / free shipping), but you can still get lucky with mistake fares and/or pay people to violate all the terms and conditions and fly in your name, if you're sneaky about it.