10. Flipkart’s Free Shipping Below Minimum Purchase
On Flipkart, Free Shipping is available only for products above Rs. 300. sOtherwise one has pay Rs 30 fordelivery charges. Now, one glitch with FlipKart that people found was that technically FlipKart never ships multiple products together. If one shopped a number of products of more than a total of Rs. 300, you were eligible to get free shipping, but products always arrived individually. Some people found a loophole in this concept. What they did was they ordered the necessary stuff that was below Rs. 300 and merged it with an unwanted order, so that the total amount in the cart exceeded Rs. 300. Now the thing to remember here was that the unwanted product should have been such that it would always be delivered after the 1st product arrived. So soon after the first product (below Rs. 300) is delivered, the second product was cancelled, so as to avail a free shipping for anything below Rs. 300. I am not entirely sure if this still works, but it used to a couple of years ago.
9. Patym Cheat
In 2013, when Paytm was launched in India, they offered free coupons on recharge of mobile phones online through credit cards at no extra charges. People eventually found out that even on a minimum recharge of Rs. 5 or Rs. 10, they received coupons of Rs 200 for online megastores such as Jabong, Myntra, Yebhi, Naaptol, etc. People started using this loophole to maximum and even went on to use this trick in combination with others they found later until the idea of coupons with recharge was dropped by Paytm.
8. E-Bay’s Free Coupons
In the early days of e-commerce in India, around 2009, E-Bay used to give coupons of Rs. 250 to everyone who created a new account, so one could buy anything on E-Bay that amounted less than Rs. 250 for free. Many people from around India made hundreds of mail ids and ordered stuff varying from notebooks to soaps and shampoo (mostly college students). They even went on to improve their modus operandi by buying personal domains and using Google apps to make unlimited number of mail ids. Soon e-Bay realized that people were gaming the system and got the ‘Minimum Purchase’ condition in the checkout.
7. Air India’s Free Ticket
Air India in 2011 offered Companion Free Scheme. As per the scheme, passengers buying first class or business class tickets or full fare economy class tickets were entitled to have one free ticket for their companion. But the airline’s Vigilance Department discovered serious irregularities and misuse of CFS while scrutinizing the data between October 2011 to April 2012 for tickets issued at Delhi Airport. What they found was that the main tickets were cancelled after issuance or use of CFS tickets, so many people had travelled across India for free.
6. Dhirubhai Ambani’s Silver Cheat
Early in the 1950s, officials in the treasury of the Arabian kingdom of Yemen noticed something unusual happening to their country’s currency. The main unit of money, a solid silver coin called the Rial, was disappearing from their circulation. They traced the disappearing coins south to the trading port of Aden, which was a British colony and military bastion commanding the entrance to the Red Sea and southern approaches to the Suez Canal. Inquiries found that an Indian clerk named Dhirubhai Ambani, who was then barely into his 20s had an open order out in the marketplace of Aden for as many Rials as they were available. Ambani had noted that the value of the Rial’s silver content was higher than its exchange value against the British pound and other foreign currencies. So he set on his journey to begin buying Rials as much as he could get his hands on, melt them down and sell the silver ingots to bullion dealers in London. ‘The margins were small, but it was money for jam,’ Dhirubhai later reminisced. After three months he was stopped, but he made a few lakhs of rupees at that time.
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