There are people who buy dollar coins straight from the US mint (with free shipping) with credit cards, deposit the coins to pay off the bill, and accumulate rebates and frequent flier miles. IIRC one guy bought an appreciable fraction of a million dollars worth of coins, a few grand at a time, and got a similarly ridiculous number of frequent flier miles out of it.
One reason this is considered "real life hacking": it's an exploit of a bug. Credit card companies generally exclude "buying cash" from their rewards programs ("some restrictions may apply"), but some of them failed to account for dollar coins as a form of cash.
Hate to be nitpicky, but the U.S. Mint does not print anything. They mint coins. They fund operations with licensing the Minting machines to other nations and collectible coins. They also at one point minted other nations'coins.
For a long time, 1 in 6 20oz pepsi products had an instant win cap worth another soda free. If you held the bottle still enough at the right angle you could easily check the cap in the reflection on the soda. I don't think the savings over the years of free soda would be enough to cover my dentist bills though...
A friend of mine, Paul, did this in Zurich back in 2002. He saw that the Migros grocery franchise was giving 10x points for a week, some products were giving 10x points and his credit card was giving (I think) 10x points for the month. There was a special offer for miles-to-points at the time. So he put it all together for about 30 round-trips flights in Europe for a couple thousand bucks. At first they yelled at him, and then they relented.
When he told me about the idea, I just thought it was funny. When he told me he found a product cheap enough, and spelled it out, I immediately went to get the Migros point card, only to find out I had to wait a week for it, and the offers expired in the meantime. Damn.
Edit: I'm really fuzzy on the details. I'll ask him about it, if you want the exact specifics.
this is a good example of needing money to make money. When I was unemployed for a while I found myself in a death spiral where I didn't have enough liquid cash to take advantage of some money making opportunities that came along.
Worse than that: not having money means not having safety nets, getting injured/sick/stressed with no backup, resulting in losing the job/house/car..and down you go.
Periodically you will find cereal boxes with a 'Free Adult Movie Admission' inside. The cereal is around $3.00 while movie admission is around $14. My friend and I used to buy some cereal, tear off the coupons on the way to the theatre and enjoy a nutritious snack during the movie.
I ask because this anecdote seems to be verbatim from the movie "Punch Drunk Love". Although the movie I mention was released in 2002: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272338/
The film was inspired by an article in 'Time' magazine about David Phillips, a University of California civil engineer who stumbled upon a lucrative frequent-flyer promotion. By purchasing 12,150 cups of Healthy Choice pudding for just $3,000, he accumulated 1.25 million air-miles.
And let us not forget the Lazlo Hollyfeld from the 1985 classic The Real Genius (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/) who computerized his "no purchase necessary, enter as often as you like" way to millions in cash and prizes.
The short version: in 1975, at the dawn of the computer age, a group Caltech students used the school's IBM mainframe to print out 1.2 million entries to a McDonald's sweepstakes, stuffing them into the entry boxes at 98 separate restaurant locations. The students ended up winning 20% of the prizes, including a new car and $3000 worth of groceries.
(Actually, that was one of the many things that annoyed be about that film. When Adam Sandler was comparing all the different products to gain the miles, I yelled at the TV "Buy the freakin' puddings you moron." When he subsequently did, my wife looked at me like I was prescient; I made the mistake of telling her that element was based on a true story hence my foresight.)
It's funny that the company made that mistake, but it is really cool that the guy got his miles. I would have thought that they would have a 'Some Restriction may apply' clause and have put a maximum on the amount of miles you can receive.
I thought that "miles" is just a nice name for reward points:
"Simply multiply the cost of your travel purchases by 100. For example, if your ticket costs $200, you’d multiply that by 100 to determine you need 20,000 miles to redeem."
In fact, in that story the guy might have had a lot of "miles", but it is only $12,500 in dollar equivalent. It means that this "great" hack is a hack, without "great". Please correct me if I am wrong.
Indeed, miles is just a nice name for reward points, but you're not quite on target with the calculations. In American Airline's AAdvantage program, you earn miles per dollar spent (for example, CitiBank's AAdvantage card earns 1 mile per dollar spent[1]). However, it takes a static number of points depending on your departure and arrival locations[2].
On top of the $1 = 1 mile business, for whatever reason, lots of airlines hand out frequent flyer miles like candy. American Airlines used to give you 1,000 miles ($500 worth, as you get double points with AA services) just for booking a vacation through their service... the pudding is another example of this. There's lots of potential for bonus miles, basically.
So, depending on how you want to look at it, doing this without rewards, he earned $1,250,000 worth of miles for around $3750. With rewards, it could be anything, but surely he paid the minimum amount.
"Phillips also got Aadvantage Gold status for life with American Airlines, which brings a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades, and bonus miles."
One reason this is considered "real life hacking": it's an exploit of a bug. Credit card companies generally exclude "buying cash" from their rewards programs ("some restrictions may apply"), but some of them failed to account for dollar coins as a form of cash.