Reddit’s Most Evil ‘Life Hacks’

Reddit, that bastion of human kindness and human depravity, is the perfect source for Evil Week. With anonymous handles and endless discussions taking place, people are more than happy to reveal some of their most devious behaviours. One particular thread of note highlighted some of the most ‘unethical’ and possibly illegal life hacks that you really shouldn’t feel good about performing. Here are the best bits.

It’s Evil Week at Lifehacker, which means we’re looking into less-than-seemly methods for getting shit done. We like to think we’re shedding light on these tactics as a way to help you do the opposite, but if you are, in fact, evil, you might find this week unironically helpful. That’s up to you.

Tyre Swap

Are you due for some new tyres? This definitely illegal tip suggests that getting a rental car for a few hours, driving it back to your place and swapping out your old tyres with the rental cars tyres is the best way to go about it. Rental cars aren’t as expensive as four new wheels, so you’d be saving a nice wad of cash, I guess.

Of course, the terms and conditions of many rental companies – Budget, Hertz, Europcar – explicitly state that there are consequences for using their service in this kind of way. However, further comments in the Reddit thread from employees of rental car companies suggests that they’d not be able to tell if a cars tyres have been changed anyway.

Resume Check

The thing about job-hunting is that you’re up against a whole swath of unknown faces, with different skill sets and potentially-amazing applications. Why not make your life easier by advertising for the exact same position at a made up company and get the applications sent to your email address? Well, probably because your nefarious method for collecting other people’s information is highly suspect.

However, this tip can potentially help you find out just who your competition is and what skills they have, how you stack up and what things you should be including in your own application.

“I’m A Journalist”

Parking at events can certainly be a pain, especially if you’re headed to a festival or concert. Most of the time, the exorbitant parking fees will mean you want to grab a bus or train instead, but consider the lie. Yes, you could always just lie and tell the parking attendant that you’re with media and working for a publication (of your choosing).

Whether or not they’ll make you show credentials is a 50/50 proposition, but with enough confidence and perhaps even a camera hanging around your neck, you might be able to get into the staff parking section for free. Importantly, as u/Floppypapi explains that if there isn’t staff parking, the attendant will likely be confused and just let you in any way.

I’ve seen this work first hand, as a passenger. Some made-up credentials, a camera and a big business name can get you a long way.

Fill A Slushie With Chocolate Bars

Depending on where you go, slushie cups are opaque and can hide all sorts of goods you didn’t pay for. If you grab a large slushie cup and throw a few chocolate bars inside THEN fill it up with the flavoured sugar ice, you can pay for the slushie with the attendant knowing no better.

This method is all-or-nothing. If you’re caught, you stole product and you should expect to be dealt with appropriately. It’s theft. You will be in big strife. There’s no way to explain to a service station attendant that chocolate bars slipped inside your slushie cup.

Also, you get real stick extracting the stolen goods. Ick.

Free Hotel Chargers

How many times have you stayed in a hotel and completely forgot about the charger you plugged into the wall? I’m notorious for leaving things behind, but chargers are the easiest to forgot.
So instead of taking your own charger along, why not just get to the hotel and ask if they have any spare chargers lying around? Chances are they will have a ton that they’ve been storing since time immemorial and are ready to offload them at their earliest convenience. New charger for you, less storage problems for them!

Buy New And Replace Broken

Here’s something I learnt in retail: Often customers will bring back products that don’t seem necessarily faulty but have just stopped working as efficiently as they should. It’s pretty easy to tell when a product has been absolutely thrashed for a few years, but a couple of years of good use and a minor fault? It’s near impossible to tell.

Little did I know that they might be trying this evil life hack – they’ve had a product for years and it suddenly stopped working. Then they bought a new one. Then they put the broken one back in the new one’s box, bring it back and say it’s faulty or broken. They get a refund. That’s a free upgrade. A super dodgy, free upgrade.

Let The Mailman Do Your Work For You

Mail tampering is a Commonwealth offence in Australia but this hack, from reddit user u/jsmys, suggests that if you put a letter in the mail without a postage stamp and then the address you intend to send it to as the return address – then the mail service will be doing your job for you.

What is the trade off? Granted that the deception can be traced back to you, the penalties for messing with the mail service are pretty grave. For instance, if you forge a postage stamp or use a forged postage stamp you can face up to 10 years in prison. Seems like a relatively high price to pay to save on the price of one stamp, wouldn’t you think?

Free Umbrellas

If it’s been a particularly wet day you’re likely to be carrying your umbrella to the bar. Unfortunately, due to the effects of a few drinks and a clearing skyline, you may forget to take that umbrella home with you. There’s also a solid chance that you completely forget you left your umbrella there until the next inclement weather event.

Thus, this tip, courtesy of u/sugarft, suggests that you can get a nice, new umbrella by simply going to a bar after a rainy day and saying that you left your umbrella there the night before. In their case, they found they could upgrade their umbrella the morning after because of the amount of brollies that were left there.

Reverse Bar Psychology

A sobering truth: If you tell your friends that you aren’t going to drink anymore, there’s a really good chance that they try and get you drunk. I’ve experienced this many times, especially during ‘Dry July’ when I was trying to raise money for research by abstaining from drinking for a whole month. In no other time was the pressure to drink so high.

You can use that reverse psychology to your advantage. “I’m not drinking any more” can quickly turn into “How about just one? I’ll buy!” which turns into “Shots! Shots! Shots!” Just know that if you are trying to give up the drink for real that it’s not an easy road and I don’t know if you can class people pressuring you into drinking as ‘friends’.

Steal The Necessities, Buy The Luxuries

The top voted comment in the reddit thread “unethical and possibly illegal life hacks”, this one suggests that stealing (which, just so you know, is a serious crime) the things you need most and buying the things you want is the best way to approach theft. According to u/AnotherHucksterDuck this makes you a more ‘sympathetic figure’.

It seems that humans are more sympathetic to people who steal things that they need – like food and water and clothing – but not, ya know, video games or diamond rings. The law looks at these things exactly the same way, of course, and it doesn’t matter if you steal a mink coat or a $4 cardigan from a secondhand store. It’s still theft. Toilet paper from the work bathroom? Still theft.

[Reddit]


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