Ticket Scam
We used to run a ticket scam operation at the local Chuck E Cheese.
We started small time, we used to cheat at the games like SkiBall while traffic was low and it was off times. After a few times of pulling that heist we decided to cool it because we thought it might be suspicious that we’d earn the mega bonus ticket payout regularly.
We did similar things with other games but nothing paid out like SkiBall. That’s when my buddy found out the big one.
I’m not sure if it’s like this now. Back then they used to weigh the tickets at the front in a bowl on a scale, but then they replaced them with these new machines. These machines you would feed tickets into; it would count the tickets and then present you with a slip listing how many tickets it was worth that you could redeem.
Turns out if you were delicate and had enough finesse, you could pull the strip of tickets out and then feed them back in, it would count the tickets over and over again, even though they had unique serial numbers.
Boom, infinite tickets.
The ticket counters were in the corner of place by the front, near the registers. But a few were kind of hidden away from plain sight. We would have 2 people stand guard while my buddy worked his magic. If staff came by we’d signal him and he’d feed the tickets in like normal.
Instead of having a bunch of really large tickets. We’d make some moderately sized ones mixed with some big ones and spread them out a bit, I think they had dates printed on them.
We got it all, the glowing disco ball, the special edition Barbie for my friend’s girl, candy, spray foam; the sticky hands. We never got the crazy big items like the bike because we thought it’d be too suspicious. I think we could even redeem them for Pizza which we would do when we were hungry.
We never got found out. But we eventually cooled it because it was only a matter of time. It was like Oceans’s Eleven but instead it was like Chuckee’s Four.
More of a straight up hustle than a loophole. Good memories.
Story credit: Reddit / LoveHerMore