This isn't an illegal thing but more of a tip for the thing you hate. Most credit card companies will let you open and close virtual credit cards tied to your main account, but with a new card number etc. I make a new virtual card for every subscription I have. If I want to cancel the service and it takes more than 5m to do so through the company that provides that service, I just turn off the virtual credit card they will try and fail to charge for the next payment.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Pretty much any tax avoidance loopholes. The more money I have the more I see how ridiculously skewed in favor of the rich everything is. My income is taxed at a lower rate than my capital gains, meaning that not only did I make several thousand dollars last year on stock sales I did literally nothing to earn, but I paid very little on taxes for it. There is also a scheme a friend of mine uses to reduce his tax burden even more by recording losses that only exist on paper by swapping between essentially equivalent assets. The system is designed to punish poor people for being poor and reward rich people for being rich.
A popular scheme I have seen is:
Owner registered and de-facto runs an incorporated Company. Company employs Owner and pays them a small salary (down to state minimum wage even), so Owner minimizes the income tax they pay.
The car Owner drives is owned by the Company for "business purposes", which allows the car to be operated within 50 miles of the Company (and farther with supplemental insurance). Company counts the car purchase/lease, maintenance, gas as expenses, bringing down the bottom line.
Flights, travel, meals could be paid by the Company, as long as it's tangentially "business related".
The house Owner lives in (or several houses for the family) is owned by the Company and is rented to Owner for very cheap, so Company pays the taxes, maintenance, etc, breaking even, or taking a loss on this house. Again, this brings down the company's bottom line.
Somehow, purchases for a Company can be exempt from sales taxes, too.
In the end, on paper, the Company is barely making any profit, but the Owner might be enjoying a nice car, nice house, and vacations. All for "business purposes" of course. While you pay taxes on your income and purchases like an idiot
It gets worse. CEOs take out zero interest, or exteremly low interest loans on corporate assets. They then use the money tax free.
I will say a lot of what you've discussed here is actually illegal but very rarely enforced. Pretty much every small business owner I know is pulling shit like this but it's basically never enforced even though it's illegal fraud.
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Non-profit scams. You can set one up, put out a call for donations claiming you do some blah blah blah work, and give yourself most of the money in the form of a salary/bonus. Only a small percentage of the money ever needs to go to anyone in need.
This happens in all sorts of corporate and religious charities. The NFL was technically non-profit for many years, and that should say it all.
A free trial automatically rolling into a paid subscription.
Shooting plainclothes cops that execute a no-knock warrant on your home.
Seriously.
All states--ALL states--have a castle doctrine that allows you to use lethal defense to protect yourself inside your home. A no-knock warrant being executed by cops out of uniform means that you have a reasonable belief that your home is being invaded, and that your life is at immediate risk. Now, admittedly, you probably aren't going to survive that exchange of gunfire. But the state is going to have a really hard time charging you with shooting at/killing a cop if you do.
In Indiana cops are not excluded from castle laws
Even better: you have a specific legal right to resist police attempting to illegally enter your home. :D IIRC, the law was passed after the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that under then state law you had no right to resist even blatantly illegal actions by police.
I'm gonna assume by "all states" you mean "all states within the USA".
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Walking around absolutely drenched in water.
Spam calls. Like, if you're willing to spend, what, 50 dollars?, you can absolutely destroy people's sanity with never ending calls from disposable numbers
Technically this is illegal in lots of countries. It's just hard to enforce afik.
For subscriptions, I highly recommend using disposable cards like Privacy.com (no affiliation, just a customer). If I want to try out Prime, or Starz, or a "free until..." promotional offer, I just spin up a card. It's connected to my bank account, locked to that single merchant, and they can't charge more than whatever spending limit I put on that card. Honestly, I don't always even sign in to a service to cancel, it's much easier to just pause or delete a card, and then they can't charge you anymore. It's free for us because they collect a small portion of the transaction amount (like Visa, PayPal, etc)...
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police being able to lie to you
The worst one they tell is "We're cops, were not allowed to lie. "
Fuckers.
Corporations that don't pay taxes being allowed to make millions in profit while their employees qualify for welfare because they pay them so little.
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The FTC under Biden was actually craking down on that. It was called the "Click to Cancel" rule, but that was literally a month before the election. :/
Lina Khan was a perhaps once in a lifetime bureaucrat doing good for the people at a rapid pace on normal government timelines and now she’ll probably never get that job or a better one again.
Advertising. At what point did we as a society decide that it was perfectly acceptable for companies to manipulate us - especially children - into buying shit we don't need and didn't even want until the ad sold us on it? It's fucking wild.
Adblocking feels to me like it should be illegal, but isn’t. I have adblockers on all my devices and haven’t seen an ad for years; it feels like a secret super power and stopped the web from looking like a trashy back alley.
Nah, I pay for my bandwidth, I get to decide what it does and does not get used for. Even if that's not nearly as big a concern as it used to be in like the late 90s, it's the principle of I'm not going to pay for you to shove your garbage down my throat.
And yeah I haven't seen an ad in years and years on PC. People complain about youtube ads and I'm like 'What's that? I watch a lot of youtube and I've not seen an ad in like 10 years.' Sadly on mobile that's a little more complicated, but adding a private dns of 'dns.adguard.com' blocks most things.
I am always shocked when I have to use a browser without an ad blocker. How do people tolerate it?
I mean, I get it. I know many people have no idea about adblocking, etc. But goddam. It's so awful without it.
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Dating sites besieging their users with bots and fake profiles.
Loaning money to your own political campaign and then paying yourself back, including an interest rate set by you, using donor funds.
There are a number of things that are legal here in the US, which would count as corruption in other places.
Capitalism
Any type of exit fee like account closing. Any costs for leaving should be charges before leaving as part of business costs either at the start or part of monthly or whatever. Leaving should be free.
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Biden administration was working on making that unsubscribe bullshit illegal last year. But then Trump so those tactics will probably be mandatory pretty soon...
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In the US, unsubscribing from email spam is legally required to be easy under the CAN-SPAM act. For paid subscription services, I believe they also are required to be as easy to leave as they are to join in the EU and California.
Somewhat related, many dark patterns are treated like fraud.
the CAN-SPAM act
I once wrote a community college paper for my friend in exchange for some work on my car. He had to write a paper on the CAN-SPAM act.
I did the assignment, covered all the requirements, explained it and whatnot. I then wrote a SECOND paper, appended to the end of the first. This second paper also met the length requirements, but was a parody. About the Hormel meat product, Spam. In cans. Can-Spam. I was very proud of it. It was funny.
I kept asking my friend if he ever got feedback from the professor. He never did. It was then that I learned professors often don’t read papers like this, they just assign them to get students to read and practice writing. It made me sad.
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EULAs that say 'using this indicates your acceptance of these terms'. Seems like it ought to be illegal but it's super common.
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Ice cream, after you haven't had any for 2 weeks
Leaving a supermarket without buying anything
Sometimes I get so pissed they don't have the main item I came for, that I go put everything back on the shelves, exactly where they came from.
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all i’m going to say is whatever shit adobe is pulling because i could yap about this forever with anyone
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