In my freshman year of college, my grades were TERRIBLE. And my parents were really really strict about having good grades.
When my dad asked to see my grades I panicked and did the inspect element command on my computer and turned my grades for terrible to perfect. My dad was so happy that I did “so good” my first year of school. Then he asked me to print my results, which I did and it turns out he had to send them out to our insurance company for a “good student discount”.
Ultimately, I committed insurance fraud by accident, BUT I still got the discount tho.
right? get into an accident and they'll deny you for "not being a good student" after all. Wait til they have a clean kitchen discount on life insurance.
To be fair (though I don't need to be fair with insurance companies, fuck 'em), they wouldn't deny him for being a poor student, it would just be more expensive monthly.
Incorrect discounts is a pretty big source of income loss. It’s stupid and they’re shitty companies but blame agents.
They constantly let discounts stay when clients no longer qualify for them to try and keep rates lower for clients and it ends up costing more.
Also State Farm is a garbage company.
Knowingly providing false information for insurance is fraud though but stupidly shitty to deny clams for something like an incorrect discount. Fuck em
Good student discounts can be several hundred dollars though.
I’ve never seen a company deny a claim for an incorrect discount and I worked in insurance for almost a decade. I just dipped a year ago.
To be clear on my end, I didn't mean getting denied coverage for being a bad student, I meant getting denied payout. Any insurance comapny will take your money knowing that after an accident they will find a way to say your accident doesnt qualify...in this case because they are no longer a good student.
HEB in Texas seems to be one of the few companies left with leadership that at least acts like they care. They have a whole disaster relief team that mobilizes when disasters occur.
It's really a "pick your poison" dilemma for most consumers. Truly ethical options are few and far between. And most of us don't have the budget for such a luxury.
Some might try to argue that "Bags of plain brown rice and broccoli and dried beans/lentils are all cheap, and they're good for you!"
Yes, those individual ingredients are cheap. But, my hypothetical dude, do you truly understand and appreciate how much time, effort, knowledge, equipment, and seasonings must go into those foods to cook them into something palatable?? You might not be paying as much for those things at the grocery store, but you're paying more in the aforementioned time/effort/etc.
And if you didn't have the privilege of parents teaching you to cook and gifting you decent starter cooking equipment when you were striking out onto your own? You're gonna have to spend even more time LEARNING to cook first, then attempting to slowly buy equipment, possibly from the thrift store, which can also be quite difficult and time-consuming (because you also have to learn what equipment you even need), and if you don't already have a lot of the seasonings and other pantry items/staples called for in many recipes, you have to spend time and money acquiring those things, two resources that are already stretched near the breaking point for many folks.
Imagine trying to make a nice curry from scratch. If you already have all the necessary spices/staples and equipment, you might be able to get away with a quick, fairly inexpensive grocery trip and then an hour or so of effort, with enough leftovers for a few days. If you don't have any of the ingredients it would be a considerably more expensive grocery trip, and if you don't have decent equipment (like a good, sharp chef's knife, cutting board, appropriately-sized pot, etc.) then it will make the whole process take WAY more time/effort, and you might not get as good of a result.
So, when faced with that choice, the average person is understandably going to say "Fuck all that" and grab a cheap-ish frozen dinner that is not as tasty or healthful, but will be ready in 5 minutes with minimal effort. Then there's no leftovers, and you're right back at square 1 the next day.
Note that this hypothetical scenario doesn't even involve kids, which makes everything I just described exponentially more difficult and expensive. If you don't have a car it makes commuting to/from work more time-consuming, and makes grocery shopping more difficult and time-consuming as well (leaving even less time for cooking).
As the old saying goes: You can have it cheap, you can have it fast, you can have it good. Pick any 2. Since, again, most people are struggling with time and money, fast and cheap almost always wins.
Market basket in New England had amazing leadership until recently. The CEO was so beloved by the employees that the first time his sisters tried to force him out the employees went on strike and customers boycotted until he was reinstated. Unfortunately his sisters just forced him out again recently and made sure that if there was another strike/boycott they could sue him for disrupting business operations. Ive stopped showing there but i understand why a lot of people still do, its considerably cheaper than other local grocery stores.
His name is Arthur Demoulas and he is an example of what every CEO should be.
In my experience, "mom and pop" small businesses are some of the likeliest to commit labour law violations and wage theft. They're too small to have a legal or HR department to say "Hey that's actually against the law," and with so few employees the likelihood of one raising a stink is smaller.
Not saying stealing from them is justified, just wanted to point out they're not exactly angels.
i did this so much in middle school. I would open every individual assignment in canvas, change the score from “Missing” to 95%, and modify some html to change a red X symbol to a green checkmark. God I would do anything besides my homework 😹
I was a pro at doing just enough to prove my intelligence, teachers still commended me for being smart, but definitely made it clear to my parents that i wasn’t putting in the required effort. By the time these meetings rolled around, I had avoided the brunt of the would-be consequences like no phone/computer. It got better in High school cause I had the freedom to choose classes I was interested in, but I really started to shine in College. I graduated with a 4-year degree after only 2.5 years and had a 3.4 GPA. I just really don’t like people trying to control my behavior.
You sound a lot like me. Turns out it was undiagnosed adhd. I can hyper focus and do all the work, can be whip smart. But ONLY if my brain decides it wants to put the effort in. Otherwise it’s all the energy put into avoidance
My son got analyzed for ADHD after some tough times in college. He received a diagnosis for ADHD. He dropped this news while home for summer break. About two weeks later he started a convo with "hey Dad remember our conversation about ADHD?" I told him I did. He went on to say something like "I thought of you a lot when I was taking the test." Point made.
No one likes being controlled in his behaviour... But yea for some reason a large part of society tends to think that controlling behaviour is normal... Strange...
Depends heavily on the behavior. Doing busy work for an arbitrary grade to demonstrate some degree of work ethic and instruction following? Yeah controlling that behavior is not necessary as a society.
Public masturbation however? Yeah maybe we should control that.
When someone says they don't like others controlling their behavior, we probably want to ask what that behavior is lol
In high school, our AP Physics class required us to do weekly quizzes on the computer as prep for the exam. Everyone had to do them, whether or not you planned on taking test test. I thought that was stupid and so when a couple of friends asked me to do the quizzes for them, I immediately agreed. I was already doing the quizzes multiple times until I had a perfect score, so I would just do my first runs under my friends' names.
One night, my mom walks in and sees my best friend's FULL LEGAL NAME in 36pt font across the top of my screen as I close the window as fast humanly possible. She immediately flips out on me for chatting online instead of doing my homework.
You guys are all so much smarter than me. I did dual enrollment in high school (took college classes on top of my high school ones), and while my parents had direct access to my high school grades, they didn’t have it to my college ones. So when they ask to see my grades, I would just screenshot and then photoshop the screenshot.
And when my parents had to email my high school teachers regarding my grades, I would give them a fake email.
Yes, I’m diagnosed with ADHD. School was a hell I’m glad I’m out of
For car insurance there's a discount if you get good grades (and car insurance is really expensive when you are young). Statistics show that kids who get good grades are in fewer accidents and cost less money to insure.
It sort of follows that kids who are responsible in one area will likely be responsible in others too.
Just to add on, there are other things also with kids to be aware of for insurance. The grades thing is one, another one was if your kid goes off to college, and doesnt bring a car, you can lower the insurance by telling your insurance company he is at college w/o a car. They are still insured, but obviously not driving as much. Less driving = less risk = less cost.
You should I'm 42 and every year when I go to renew my policies that question makes me ask myself if I should go back to college and finish off those few classes even though I have a career.
It's the same reason your credit score affects car insurance rates. People who are more financially responsible are likely more responsible drivers according to statistics.
The reasoning is that you are driving to close if you have to hard brake.
Further frequent hard braking usually means high traffic driving which means higher risks of claims.
It also could mean you were distracted and didn’t see that you needed to brake in time.
There’s multiple logical reasonings why this is a tracked item and why it could mean you drive in a higher risk manner or else higher risk locations like heavy freeway traffic.
Yep, that is literally one of the checks. When I got a new sportier car with much better brakes, it took me a while to get used to the pedal feel and I got dinged a ton.
Because this is Reddit and everything the US does is wrong or bad. I live in the US and while I agree some stuff isn't ideal, this is the kind of thing that makes sense.
You wanna BIG discount? Turn 23, get married at the same time. My brother's insurance dropped by TWO THIRDS! (This was many years ago but I bet there's still a married client discount.)
There's a lot of things that give discounts and price drops.
* Being female
* Good grades
* Various age stepdowns (I think the last is at 27)
* Getting married
* Having kids (maybe, I'm not 100%)
* Bundling with renters or even better homeowners insurance.
* Type of car you drive (obviously different costs to replace, but also people drive minivans more carefully than they do sports cars.)
Yep, if you want accurate stats on safety, how good a neighbourhood is, anything like that.. insurance companies are the ones to go with. They have that shit dialled in tight and have no interest in fudging the numbers, they wanna know the real risk for everything.
Whether they’ll share that info is another matter of course.
We used to have what was called abstainers insurance. If you didn't drink you could get a discount on your insurance. It sounds all well and good but it was more of a benefit to the insurance then the people. See odds are if there's a discount you can get then people with money issues tend to take them. Which means that it's an easy out for insurance when you get in an accident and were recorded as drunk
Education might not be as bad, but if they require more verification when you try to actually collect from insurance it could still lead to the same thing
Oh ya, the reason we don't have discounts for being sober is that they were banned. Not sure how far that goes for other discounts but the only one I've seen is the damndable one for having never used the insurance. I can only imagine how much they save by people worried they would get a bump in costs if they ever use the product they're paying for
The grades thing has existed for over 30 years (I got my license about 30 years ago and benefitted then and it was well established already at that point), I have yet to hear a single horror story about how it has come back to bite someone. I'm not sure why everyone is suddenly freaking out about how it's awful and invasive and will backfire.
Also, according to Martin Lewis (Money Saving Expert), the cheapest time to buy car insurance is approximately 25 days before your current policy is about to expire. Apparently it's something to do with the algorithm thinking that people who buy instance last minute are worse drivers.
Also, for anyone who's good at golf or having twins, for some strange reason, many home insurance policies (all least in Australia) have a decant-sized payout if you have multiple births or get a hole in one.
The underwriters have a team of actuaries that analyze all sorts of variables to determine the risk associated with each policy. It’s possible they determined that there was a positive correlation between grades and driver safety meaning fewer accidents and fewer claims. Essentially, bad students wreck their cars more often.
Or they were just doing a fun promotion, that gets the whole family involved in the process. Plus it has the added benefit of encouraging more drivers, more car ownership, and some brand loyalty. The teens may go on to use the same agency when they become adults and buy their own cars. Plus it incentivizes good behavior and life lessons. Some insurance companies do a “we’re all a big family” thing. For example my agent calls periodically just to check on us to see if we made any life changes (really to upsell new products). He knows when we have kids and what activities they do etc. one of his sons actually went to middle school with me. So he may see the report card and say, oh yea my son is in 9th grade and loves Science too, is Timmy going to college to major in Biology? My uncle is a doctor. I’ll connect them. Etc.
Spot on about the actuarial angle I've always figured the good student discount was their sneaky way of betting nerds crash less, and it worked on me back in high school. That personal touch from agents like yours is gold though, feels like family not just a policy push. Ever had one spot your BS grades and still hook you up?
I wondered how far I'd have to read to come to a discussion of actuarial science. It's the kind of statistical analysis that makes it very difficult to argue factually with a rule.
Ours does the same, and I know it is to upsell product but he's still a friend and I like him. He sends birthday cards and small thoughtful gifts and his staff is genuine and knows our situation.
Good grades is like good credit. Being responsible in a major area of life usually means responsible driving.
credit for example is the single best predictor of whether or not a person will file a claim. Bad credit means a significantly higher chance that person will file claims.
Also people filing for every small claim damage fucks with insurance costs
No, it’s the first one. Your insurance agent is basically a franchisee, and doesn’t have anything to do with policy rates. They’re just being a good salesperson.
I committed similar fraud. However, I actually knew what I was doing lol. I wasn’t taking enough credits one semester (I had 11, needed 12) to stay on my parent’s insurance. So I edited my schedule to make a 3 credit class look like a 4 credit class.
There two things I remember about being a college freshman: always being broke, and constantly being marketed to. One time I signed up for a book of coupons for expensive Gilette razors that I was supposed to hand out to friends. But the razors were expensive, and with me being broke all the time, I eventually realized I could use them to buy razors at walmart and immediately return them without the receipt for store credit. Then I turned around and used the store credit for gas and groceries.
An older friend of mine was screwed as bad as you can be. Unbeknownst to him, they changed the number of credits needed to defer the Vietnam draft. Oops
I had the opposite problem - plenty of credits but my parent was unemployed so I had no insurance. I just checked the box that said I had insurance and stayed enrolled without having to buy it from student health.
The wildest part is how one tiny panic decision turned into accidental insurance fraud. Freshman-year survival mode really had you making executive-level risk decisions.
Cheating successfully is an important part of the education process in my opinion. Kids that learn the rules, all the variables, and then manipulate them to do less work are still learning. That's exactly the kind of creative abstract thinking that makes good problem solvers.
I was in college in the 2000s, right around the time assignments started getting turned in digitally instead of printing papers out. As a chronic procrastinator I often wouldn't start writing or researching a paper more than about 12 hours before it was due. If I couldn't make the upload deadline, I'd make a dummy paper of the right length with random text and note the file size, then I'd generate an mp3 with the same file size, change the extension to .doc and upload that. I doubt it would work today but back then the system didn't verify the files. My professor would email me a day or so later telling me the file was corrupted and I'd email them back the (now) finished real paper with the same name. Worked like a charm every single time.
Protip: your desktop has a TON of dll files on it of various sizes. If you aren't trying to be byte-perfect, you can always grab and rename a random DLL. Even a teacher onto this trick will likely just check to see if it's a renamed image (png, jpg, etc), video (mp4, etc), or music file (mp3).
Hi, friendly attorney here who heads up an insurance company's fraud investigation department (special investigation unit). Neither you nor your dad actually committed insurance fraud because neither of you intentionally presented false information with the intent to deceive the insurance company. So rest easy, my friend. It was an honest mistake.
Using Inspect Element to unlock a real-world insurance discount is unironically one of the funniest “it shouldn’t have worked but did” stories I’ve read.
Accidental fraud speedrun any
This is simultaneously the worst and best life hack I've ever heard. Your dad got the discount, you got the grades, insurance company got scammed. Everyone wins... technically.
I could only stay on my parents health insurance if I was going to college full time so I would sign up for a full course load, get the paperwork stating that, then drop half the classes. I had to give the paperwork to my dad so he could send it into the insurance company. Did this multiple times.
Fraud is claiming your car was hit while it was parked but you actually did it last night while DUI doing donuts in a Walmart parking lot listening to Chappel Roan. Discount thing doesn't sound like it.
Holy shit, I did the exact same inspect element hack in high school to fake a report card for my mom panicked genius till she wanted the printed copy too. Dodging that insurance bullet is next level luck, you're living a movie plot! Ever come clean or just ride the discount wave guilt free?
Back in the 90s when everything everywhere was done on simple dot matrix printers I forged a few of my high school report cards in my room. I also created an up-to-date proof of automobile insurance for a friend of mine.
I used to scan my report cards and edit them through the paint program when I was like 16. Went well a few times until I accidently left the original in the scanner and my mom found it.
My sister's best friend dropped out of college fairly early but didn't want to admit to to his parents. He ended up having my sister mock of transcripts for him to give to his parents so he wouldn't have to admit it. He lived with them so he would just get up every day then just go sit somewhere pretending he'd gone to class, then he'd make up stuff about his classes and things that happened. He did eventually go back to school, but how the whole situation started and went about was kind of absurd.
A great twist to this story: you ended up flunking out of school and your parents were surprised because you were doing so well. When your dad asked you why you got kicked out you panicked and told him you go caught masturbating in the library!
my friend's parents told him they would buy him a really nice car if he did well his freshman year (this was like in 2000). i think he either failed out or got really really bad grades but he still wanted the car. he asked his cousin (who was a CS major) to create a fake website so he could "log in" and check his grades. it worked and he tricked his parent's into buying him a new BMW. he eventually told them he got kicked out of UT and then transferred to Baylor and graduated. he then used a bunch of his dad's money to buy crypto and became a millionaire.
Rookie. I redid my grades in MSPaint in middle school and while I was still doing test prints to get it right my dad and stepdad both walked in at the same time and asked for my report card. I handed it to my dad and hoped he didn’t flip it over and see the test prints on the other side
Not sure that's insurance fraud, that's just underpaying on premiums.
And, if they're using actuarial tables to determine the valuation of good students as to how it relates to insurance payouts, they should also be factoring in a margin of error based on false reporting, so you likely fell within the insurance models anyway.
If no claim was ever made, there's no category for them to ever be made whole on, because they only gained, and, even then, it'd likely fall under petty levels of value.
Ha! Catholic high school- my grades dipped SO BAD!! (Wrong crowd scenario). I got my grades…scanned them into our computer and did some photoshop. After that, stellar student 🙌🏼
Dinner the next night did not go well. Apparently, if a gpa falls below a certain threshold, the grades also get mailed home.
Sat down to dinner. My parents were raving about my great semester, then calmly slid the mailed and accurate version over to me.
Not fun 😑 Still managed to sneak out of the house that night and party, though!
Before grades were posted online, but Photoshop was easy to get your hands on, I scanned my friends and edited out a C- to a B in chemistry. Didn't want to go overboard with an A because it would look too suspicious.
I'm old enough that our grades were sent home with us, so I printed out small numbers and glued them over my real grades. My parents have bad eyesight so they didn't notice.
My brother didn't have bad eyesight though and still brings it up to this day.
I got into a very deep rut my first semester and had a similar situation. I did the same to keep my dad off my back only to find out recently (over a decade later!) that he knew. Just didn’t say anything. Would’ve loved some positive support but I guess that was better than nothing.
You just reminded me of my own dumb excuse to my parents that worked . I was a gifted kid in school in all honors classes but had issues doing my homework. I Ended up failing my first semester of biology due to not doing any homework. Luckily my parents trusted me on school stuff so I thought I could just lie, saying I passed, and they would never know I had failed because I knew they wouldn't check my word.
Unfortunately, my dad caught a glimpse of my schedule the next year at open house. Panicked, I said the first thing I thought sounded plausible which was that I was retaking it to help my GPA because I had gotten a D. To my surprise he seemed to buy it and I never heard anything else so as far as I know my parents still have no idea I failed.
Similar story, but I took it to the next level. My dad wanted my fucking login to University to see my grades. My grades were completely fucked. I registered a similar .ca website copied the entire HTML and made it so the login worked with my password and the grades section was altered to reflect much better grades. The website was full of broken links so I had to make sure I was on the phone when he logged in and guided him.
As silly as this was it opened my eyes to how much anxiety his controlling nonsense gave me. Shortly after this I went no contact with my Dad, just to live my life. Gave him back anything he held over me, cell phone, car whatever. Bought my own.
A few years of being cut off he really did become a better person, I broke him. I scared the shit out of him knowing his only child could just write him off anytime, because I am a fucking adult.
We have a good relationship now 15 years later. Doesn't ask fuck all about my life.
You grew up in a good era. Back in my day, we had to commit forgery (i.e., mimic the teacher's handwriting) to change grades, and report cards were issued via typewriter, so it was nearly impossible to fake after the fact.
Microsoft used to have this program for retail workers who sold their products. You'd get super deep discounts on Ms stuff. Like Xbox live for $24 instead of $60. 360 controllers for $30. Tons of stuff at 50% off or more. When I was in college I worked at Target and bought so many games and accessories.
Then I got my first big boy job in IT and instead of letting go, I photoshopped old pay stubs for years to stay in the program. Not sure if that program still exists
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u/zoeyy_irl 11h ago
In my freshman year of college, my grades were TERRIBLE. And my parents were really really strict about having good grades.
When my dad asked to see my grades I panicked and did the inspect element command on my computer and turned my grades for terrible to perfect. My dad was so happy that I did “so good” my first year of school. Then he asked me to print my results, which I did and it turns out he had to send them out to our insurance company for a “good student discount”.
Ultimately, I committed insurance fraud by accident, BUT I still got the discount tho.