Gaming the system is everyone’s dream. Tricks, tips, loopholes, back-door solutions to problems, or rewards that are normally time-consuming, costly, or difficult to obtain. As the digital world becomes more advanced, these sorts of phenomena are becoming rarer every day. But every once in a while, a new one pops up, and the people who are in the know win big time.
That’s what happened on November 24th when a group of people reportedly discovered a way to game General Motors’ Rewards points system, allegedly racking up millions of points to purchase car accessories, merch like clothing, and even cover car payments.
The loophole, which has since been closed, reportedly allowed people to earn points by repeatedly completing simple tasks on one of GM’s websites, then transferring those points to their GM account to cash them in.
Someone Screwed Up
First, let me explain how GM’s point system works. It’s a loyalty program, as you’d find with most major credit cards, where you can earn points by spending money on stuff like service at GM dealerships, warranties, subscriptions, accessories, and car payments. Like most credit card reward systems, you can turn around and redeem these points in exchange for accessories, service, or, if you have a loan through GM Financial, car payments, according to the program’s website.
You don’t have to spend money to earn GM Rewards points. According to this page on GM’s financial site, you can earn points by doing something as simple as downloading the app, opting for paperless billing, signing up for auto pay, or getting text alerts. Every 100 points is worth $1 in GM’s reward redemption system.
Here’s where the loophole comes in. Recently, GM launched a “Route 2 GM Rewards” promotional website that allowed people to accumulate points by interacting with the site by performing simple tasks. According to Resell Calendar, the site that broke the news, these tasks weren’t anything challenging or time-consuming:
The rewards platform included various promotional actions users could complete for free points. These weren’t referral bonuses or anything requiring actual purchases. They were simple promotional tasks like watching videos, completing surveys, or engaging with GM content. Nothing complicated. The whole process took about five minutes.
If you go to the site now, you’re met with a generic error message:
Resell Calendar says these tasks could only be completed once per account, and netted 13,000 to 16,000 points in total (worth $130 to $160). But fatally for GM, this standalone website reportedly had no way of verifying who was completing the tasks—anyone with an email could simply sign up and start earning points. It didn’t have to be connected to a GM Rewards account. At the same time, those points could allegedly be instantly transferred to other accounts, with no limits on transfer time or amount.
This reportedly allowed users to create numerous accounts on the site with different emails, meaning they could complete the easy tasks over and over again, printing a steady stream of free points that could be transferred to a single GM Rewards account of their choosing.
The Fallout
Here’s where things get juicy. Once people discovered the loophole’s existence, they were off to the races, racking up points and cashing them in, according to numerous posts to X. A Nov. 24 post giving instructions on how to exploit the loophole published by user thedealsguy_ has been viewed by over 1 million accounts as of this writing:
FREE GM REWARD POINTS ????
GM system is giving out free points for doing simple tasks. Doing them all can net you some serious rewards points that can be used for various GM products like car accessories and Vehicle Financing
1. MAKE AN ACCOUNThttps://t.co/AtvbfHytCJ
2. GO… pic.twitter.com/3ADwXcKuao
— thedealsguy (@thedealsguy_) November 24, 2025
Under this post are numerous replies from people claiming to have successfully exploited GM’s loophole. Users claimed to have obtained stuff like batteries, jumper packs, and clothing at either a deeply discounted price or entirely for free by redeeming points earned through the trick:
In addition to merch, people with cars financed by GM claimed to have used the points to partially pay off their car loans. One person says they knocked $127 off their loan thanks to the scheme (I’ve reached out to them to see if that points credit has since been rescinded by GM, or if it still stands). One screenshot making the rounds online, shared by Resell Calendar to X, seems to show someone using over 5.9 million points (nearly $60,000) to pay off the remainder of a Cadillac Escalade V loan:
Someone is getting fired pic.twitter.com/6T4aSQYh2H
— Resell News ???? (@resellnews) November 25, 2025
Whether that particular screenshot is real or not is anyone’s guess. While I wouldn’t put it past someone to lock in and create dozens of accounts to rack up enough points to cover a $60,000 car loan, it feels a tiny bit too good to be true. Resell Calendar didn’t reply to my inquiry about the screenshot’s source, and a GM spokesperson told me over the phone that it’s not sharing any specifics about the loophole, so it’s impossible to truly confirm if someone used this scheme to dig themselves out of five figures of debt. Seeing how expensive cars are getting these days, I definitely want to believe it.
The company did, at least, confirm to me that people were gaming the system. Here’s its full statement:
We are aware of misuse of the Route to GM Rewards promotion, which has resulted in its pause as we determine next steps.
If you’re mad about missing your chance to potentially pay off that Silverado in your driveway for free, you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself. GM quickly realized what was going on that day and appeared to have shut down the site before more people caught wind of the exploit. As early as later that night on the 24th, people were posting to X that the trick was no longer available. So if you were able to benefit in any way, consider yourself extremely lucky.
The Latest In A Long Line Of Loopholes
GM’s Points slip is one of dozens of corporate promotional loopholes that have been discovered over the years. Like I said in the beginning, this stuff is pretty rare, so when it does happen, it always makes big news.
My personal favorites involve airline miles. In 1999, a man named David Phillips discovered he could turn 25-cent cups of Healthy Choice pudding into 500 airline miles through a promotion the brand was running. So he bought 12,150 cups for a total of $3,140 and turned them into over 1.2 million miles—enough for lifetime AAdvantage Gold status with American Airlines and 31 round-trip tickets to Europe. He was even able to write off $815 on his taxes because he donated the pudding to the local Salvation Army.
Then there was the U.S. Mint’s dollar coin debacle in the early 2010s. In an effort to get more dollar coins into circulation, it offered people the chance to buy the coins at face value and have them shipped directly to their house for free. People soon discovered they could use their credit cards to buy the coins, earning airline miles in the process. They’d simply return the coins to their bank and pay off the balance every month, meaning they were essentially getting points for free. This loophole was eventually closed in 2011, when the Mint stopped accepting credit card payments for the coins.
It’s not just points where these kinds of exploits appear. Writing this post reminded me that back in 2013, Papa John’s held a promotion for the Super Bowl, where you could win a free one-topping pizza if you guessed the coin toss correctly. All you had to do was enter an email, so people unsurprisingly took advantage. Looking into it led me to this Reddit thread, where a user claimed to have created 60 emails—half guessing heads, and the other half guessing tails—to guarantee 30 free pizzas. Legendary.
Top graphic images: General Motors; iOS
People have found out pretty quickly that Discord’s “try this AI web browser or play this game for 15 minutes to earn points” promos don’t actually look for anything other than [appname].exe running. So people have been just running any random renamed exe for free Discord points.
It’s impossible no one from the qa staff brought up this possibility in testing. They must not have any.
“created 60 emails”…….seems like a lot of effort for some free pizza, if you can even call Papa John’s pizza
“Oops, A Loophole Allegedly Allowed GM Customers To Pay Off Their Loans By Gaming Points Rewards”
Shouldn’t that be “Allowed gm Customers To Pay Off…”?
Apparently General Motors has officially turned their corporate back on capital letters, at least in their logo.
That’s just their logo, on their website when they talk about themselves in text, GM is still capitalized.
https://www.gm.com
The one I remember, in either 2008 or 2009, was the Kentucky Grilled Chicken one, wherein KFC used Oprah and her website to display a coupon for a free grilled chicken meal. Only…there was no way to validate the coupon; it was literally a non-unique image you printed off and redeemed at the restaurant. Oh, and corporate did not prep its franchises or send them enough ingredients to fulfill the outrageous influx of customers who took advantage.
Oops.
My broke high-school ass and four other people definitely piled into someone’s 1995-era Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight and got out free chicken meals, though.
The internet is a double-edged sword. Back in the day, Pudding Guy could amass his stockpile of barcodes for months without anyone being the wiser. Today, as soon as an *opportunity* comes up, someone posts it to TikTok and it’s shut down within hours.
But, since I’ll never be smart enough to think of amassing pudding lids or pallets of dollar coins on my own, I can’t really complain.
I still have several hundreds of dollar coins in their boxes at home. Got tire of the teller giving me weird looks depositing a bunch of dollar coins.
Why not just spend them?
They’ve become my cash on hand now.
Dollar Coins makes Venmo seem so basic.
I can’t be the only one bothered that the Buick Men’s Puffer Vest exists, and is $175.
In the 90s I had a Ford rewards card. I had nearly $3000 in points when I used it to help buy a new Mustang. A few months later they ended the program. Timing!
No mention of the Pepsi Harrier Jet debacle? That’s the king of all points oopsies.
Thanks! While I was reading this story that kept rolling around in my head. My memory could only recall soft drink company and a jet.
There’s even a Netflix documentary. Poor kid never got that jet.
I want an armed jet, missiles and all.
I’m betting the local HOA would be more polite if I had that hobby jet parked in the drive.
I may have said this story here before but I have a GM Rewards credit card. It was my first credit card when I turned 18. I was a big GM person then in my young and dumb days. Well, younger at least. I had a $650 limit on it. I am now 41 with multiple cards with limits over $10k. My GM card? $1000. It’s only at that level now because I asked them to increase it and they could only afford to give me a $350 increase. I will put something small on it occasionally since it’s my longest line of credit. All that to say, I’m glad people were gaming their system.
The pizzas might have been free but they were Papa John’s so even free they suck and so does Papa John. But I love the pudding guy. Bravo
That pudding points caper was used as a plot point in the film Punch Drunk Love. Underrated movie in my dumb opinion
Always push to production on weeks when no one is at the office. It’s even better than Friday at 5pm. It’s chapter 1 in the anonymous anarchist’s manual.
Why do people keep saying this isn’t a loophole because the rules allowed it? That is EXACTLY what a loophole is. Something that is allowed by reading the rules but clearly lies outside the intended purpose. The actual definition is “an ambiguity or inadequacy in the law or a set of rules.” The inadequacy being no limit on transfers of points to other accounts.
Shaking my head in incorrect pedantry condemnation solidarity
In this case it seems like the rules didn’t allow it since the rules say once per person. So those saying it’s not one “because the rules allowed it” are double wrong. It’s the website that allowed it. It is a loophole via website defect and poor design.
It’s not really a loophole when the terms of service allow the points to be used as they were. It’s more like a miscalculation of how many points could be earned by dedicated people and then turned in as allowed. Maybe somebody didn’t estimate how popular it would get, maybe somebody genuinely mis-calculated how much they’d be giving away — hard to say, but it’s still legit while it lasted.
I’ve made credit card payments in their entirety by banking rewards points before. I’ve kept a Game Pass subscription going for free for over a year just by accumulating Microsoft/Bing points and turning them in. In some ways, points programs can be “loss leaders” — the company figures that only a small percentage of consumers will do the things necessary to earn sufficient points to get benefits sufficient to fully offset payments for things — but if there are people who can, and can vouch for it, it will encourage others to play along and they at least get some merch or discounts. Maybe GM didn’t realize just how motivated people can be to save some money in tough economic times.
The loophole is creating multiple accounts to earn a reward that was intended to be redeemed once per user.
Or employees just half assing their jobs and considering the logical conclusions.
Think of how many millions of people now know about the Route 2 GM Rewards Program. Not that they planned it, but I doubt they’re too upset about it.
I leaned about it what, five minutes ago and I’m already forgotten it.
What were we talking about again?
As a software engineer, I *guarantee* you that this was a development, project management or testing oversight. GM will never say so, but its developers—or those of whichever vendor this system uses—were told to write code that would limit or throttle the points transfers, but that never happened, and QA testing never tested that scenario. Either that, or a limit never specced in the project and no one thought of it at all.
But I *highly* doubt whoever runs this project deliberately allowed unlimited, *instant* points transfers without safety rails, on the basis that few would take advantage.
With 2 GM vehicles (was 3 until a month ago) I have GM’s Reward Card. It used to have a 4% reward payed in GM points (now 3%)
I’ve only used it for repairs but the lady in the service department says several people per year buy cars completely with points.
I doubt that 6 million point balance was made by gaming this system in a short window but I don’t doubt their are people with that many points.
There is usually an annual cap on points and the points stay for X amount of years (three?). We used GM card points towards the down payment on several cars over the years. Sometimes there are bonus points towards car purchases as well. We worked one time with a veteran Cadillac salesman who helped us get extra points. The walls of his office had a lot of autograph photos from various athletes who bought Escalades from him.
The GM card was recently bought out by a different bank so that may have been the source of the loophole.
There is no annual cap to the reward points that can be earned with the GM card. Points expire after 7 years of no activity on the account.
Yes, the GM card moved to Barclays in August. The terms changed and the earnings per $1 spend were also reduced. Still hard to beat 3% back on every dollar spend. (Willing to look at other cards though if someone knows a better deal)
Sam’s Club gives you 5% off on gasoline, at any station other than Costco. The only hitch is that it comes in the form of merchandise at Sam’s.
However, I bought $45 in groceries last night for $5 by using my accumulated cash-back.
Yes, you can get cards that have specific categories with higher cash back. The problem is that most of them then give you 1% or 1.5% on anything outside of that category.
(Costco gives me 4% cash back on gas anywhere and 6% on gas purchased from Costco)
However, the real money to be made on credit card rewards are in the sign up bonuses. Plenty of cards will pay out $500 – $800 just to sign up and meet a minimum spend in a few months.
Sign up, get the bonus, cancel, record in my credit card spreadsheet, repeat in 2 years when. My wife and I each cycle though several cards per year for the bonus and keep a couple of old cards for the credit history. Last year we got about $2,000 in bonuses
I just glanced over at my RSS aggregator and before the headline’s actual words could register my brain was all like, “No! First they’re disparaging Willy Wonka, now they’re going after the OompA Loompas?!”
It’s not a loophole if the web site’s terms of service do not limit or prohibit such activity. Someone in GM marketing didn’t run the contest rules past company legal counsel.
This was the loophole. It’s not a crime to take advantage of the 3rd party not verifying things, but creating multiple accounts is very clearly against the spirit and printed rules of the promotion.
GM may find that it’s not worth the bad press to try to claw the redemptions back, but legally they probably could.
I think any loophole, by definition, is against the spirit of the rules.
Seeming oversights in laws are common, but just as often, they are intentionally arranged and carefully engineered to do what they want.
I could have automated the process.
If you’re old enough to remember Travelers’ Checks… my Pop would buy them on his GM Points card and then use them to pay his bill. He wound up buying a new 2003 Monte Carlo for around nine grand.
*sigh*
I am old enough to remember Traveler’s Checks….
Karl Malden made sure I asked for them by name.
I’m old enough to have USED traveler’s checks.
Do they still offer those? I haven’t used them in about 35 years.
No idea. I think the rampant use of credit cards might have ended them.
“While new Travelers Cheques are no longer issued, your Cheques remain backed by American Express and have no expiration date”.
Wow, if I dig up old ones they’re still valid! That’s pretty impressive.
*runs off to dig through old boxes*
Just AE or bank traveler check
It’s really something that American Express chose to go with the British spelling.
Hell I bought and used them as lately as the early 2000s
Travelled to Europe with them in 2000; I’m not entirely sure why I needed them since I did have a credit card too.
At the time you might have had the transaction declined and no (easy) way to contact the card company to lift the hold. Based on my experiences desperately trying to figure out how to call BoA from a foreign pay phone, if I ever get sent back in time to the pre-smart phone era I’m for sure bringing some travelers cheques along.
I’m old enough to remember that the American Express office in (fill in the foreign city) was a place you could get mail and turn your check into sweet and beautiful Lira’s. Also phoning from Europe? LOL not happening. Recently, well a few yers ago, my son was bicycling up a mountain in the rain in Viet Nam and called me. Witchcraft I say
Just old timey radio.
In the mid 80’s I had some travellers checks. American Express ones in Canadian Dollars. We spent them in Germany.
We got the American Dollar exchange rate.
It was worth an extra 20%
Remember them? I don’t leave home without ’em!
I have bought gift cards at the grocery store when there are special offers and use them for things like a new appliance when I need one. Usually $10 bonus on $50 card purchases
Maybe you could use those bonus dollars to help support the hard working great folks that own this site by becoming a paying member?
Doing the lord’s work.