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Comment by neurobashing | Hacker News Reader

The (IMHO wonderful) film Real Genius riffed on the real-world examples of people trying to exploit corporate sweepstakes:

"When Lazlo Hollyfeld (Jon Gries) sends in a large number of entries to the Frito-Lay contest, he is mirroring the actions of Caltech students Steve Klein, Dave Novikoff and Barry Megdal, who, in 1974, used a similar strategy to win a McDonald's sweepstakes. Their entries came to roughly 1/5th of the total entries and won them a station wagon, $3,000 cash and $1,500 in food gift certificates."

"It said enter as often as you like, so I did."

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When I was in college, a local pizza place had an online contest for “free pizza” for a year and said you could enter as many times as you like. I wrote a quick python script to fill out the form with my info that would submit it every 30 second. I got a call from the pizza place a few days later asking me to stop. They said that I was 90% of the entries and that I wasn’t acting in good faith. They offered me $100 gift card and I was happy with that.

Seems like a reasonable solution there. Nice to see it resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

I did a similar thing back in college at [insert fast food franchise name].

One branch I went had a poster that roughly says "enter our mobile app survey and get a free meal", so I connect to their public wifi, downloaded it, enter the survey, and got a text message that can be exchanged on the cashier for some decent fries and other stuff. Later I learned that the app limits one submission per device per day, so few days later I start bringing friends to submit on their phones and got ourselves a free lunch. We did this once or twice a week so the manager doesn't get suspicious.

Then one time I accidentally got disconnected to the wifi after submitting, tried reopening the app and to my surprise, it allowed me to submit again. I guessed that they limit submission per IP address, so I tried reconnecting to the wifi and the app limits me like before. Me being curious, tried using a VPN and it didn't limit me both on wifi and mobile data, so that means I can do four submissions per day per device. Imagine how many meals I can get.

Few months later, the poster was removed, then later I learned that it was also removed on every branch in the city. The app just shows a blank white screen. Today I tried downloading the app and it still shows nothing.

> Imagine how many meals I can get.

Over the medium term, not significantly more than the (stupid, but apparently intended) limit of 1/day, rate limited not by technical but by biological means.

I did something at MIT where some place was offering free personal pizzas (delivered!), and it seems their logic was one pizza per /phone number/, that they would call upon arrival with the pizza, so I went around campus and set up several classroom phones (which nobody uses no receive calls anyway) to forward calls to my dorm room's analog phone line, which fortunately you could do just by dialing some codes on the phone.

Totally unrelated, but assuming that 90% is meant here as an actual estimation and not just as a shorthand for "overwhelming majority", that comes out to one submission every five minutes, which is a lot more than I would expect a local promotion to get! Genuinely good job marking, pizza place

I liked the case where someone bought 12,000 cups of pudding to get 1.2M frequent flyer miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Phillips_(entrepreneur)

The Hoover Free Flights Promotion linked from there is an astonishing example of corporate stupidity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion#...

In that case however, it was a company trying to scam customers by making it nearly impossible to actually benefit from the promotion. No idea how someone thought that an established brand would benefit from burning their reputation for a one-time sales boost.

Several of the incidents in the movie happened at Caltech. Putting a water slide in the dorm, for example.

RG was one of the few Hollywood productions that Caltech refused to allow on campus. So they found some other buildings in the same style.

They still hired Caltech students as extras because their costume director was unable to duplicate the look of Caltech students (probably just couldn't believe it!). Most were like me - no money, and no concept of style.

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