Unconventional Tactics: 40 Captivating Stories of Loophole Exploitation

Between 1950 and 1970, the Canadian police force used a loophole in an agricultural law to slaughter thousands of Inuit dogs, in what many say was an attempt to move the Inuit off the land and into stationary “civilization.”

27. Mongols had rules against spilling noble blood over the ground. Instead, they used loopholes like making them bend backward until the backbone snapped, pouring molten silver into eyes and ears, and being rolled up in a rug and trampled to death by the Mongol cavalry.

28. Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Wall Street insider Joe Kennedy to head the newly commissioned SEC. Despite the conflict of interest, Kennedy closed numerous loopholes, established regulations, and ended the business practices that made him rich.

29. Due to a loophole in official chess rules, it used to be possible to promote your pawn into an enemy piece. In one chess puzzle, the winning move for white is to promote its pawn into a black knight.

30. During restricted suffrage, a faggot or faggot voter used to be a voter in the United Kingdom that was qualified to vote only by exploiting legal loopholes in a constituency. A landowner would hand out leases to a number of faggot voters who would then be legally qualified to vote and stuff the ballot in the constituency.

Jim Bowie, who popularized Bowie Knife, used to abuse a loophole in the law to turn himself in for being an illegal slave importer. He would then gather a reward, and keep the slaves to sell later.

32. In 1841, the State of Connecticut outlawed nine-pin bowling in an attempt to curb gambling. Ten-pin bowling was then created as a loophole to get around the law.

33. A man named Dennis Hope filed a claim of ownership of the Moon in 1980, through a loophole he found in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and has been selling property on the Moon ever since.

34. The Munsters and The Flintstones were one of the first television shows to show couples in the same bed, by using a loophole in the Hays Code, being that the couples were technically not human.

35. Aaron Burr used a loophole in a water supplying contract to trick New York legislators into approving a bank. That bank eventually became JP Morgan Chase.

Legislation sponsored by the billboard industry in the USA created a loophole in the law that allowed illegal billboards to be presumed legal if they have been in place for five years without receiving a notice of violation and the burden of proof lies with the inspectors.

37. Dribbling in basketball was originally a loophole to get around a rule against moving with the ball by bounce-passing to yourself.

38. After being fed up with wheat production quotas, Leonard Casley and his neighbors seceded from Australia with the use of loopholes in Australian law, and become an officially recognized micronation - the “Hutt River Province” in 1970. He also pronounced himself the King of his 29 sq miles of land. It was dissolved on 3 August 2020.

39. 401k plans were originally created in the early 1980s as a tax loophole for company executives to stash away more earnings. Eventually Wall Street found a whole new money stream by convincing corporations to invest in their mutual funds within the 401k.

40. Roger Nielson was a hockey coach whose repeated exploitation of loopholes in the NHL rulebook forced the NHL to make multiple new rules.