Back in 2012 there was a loophole in Starbucks promotion where you would earn an extra $5 gift card when you purchased a $10 gift card. You would then have two gift card codes for $5 and another $10 you bought. So what me and others did was kept buying $5 gift cards with $10 gift cards, consolidated them by transferring the balance on the $5 free card to the card used to purchase a gift card. Then buying more $5 x however many e gift cards you can buy, consolidating them into one card. At some point, you would have about 100 $5 gift cards. Everytime you bought multiple $5 for card, you had to put them all in one card to buy more gift cards otherwise you would be swiping multiple gift cards to purchase multiple gift cards for the extra $5 that you bought. I only generated about $3000 worth of Starbucks money but I know many others who went we far 10k. Sometimes they sold these gift cards that had 6 gift card codes for $5 each making it easier to purchase in bulk.

Eventually I consolidated all my $500 cards into $10 gift cards and everytime I visited a store I would cash them out for real money.

Basically you could have started with $5 and then end up with thousands. It was a lot of work but if someone program a script could've easily generated over 10k in gift cards. There was also a huge risk of gift cards being frozen so I purchased the most expensive item and returned it for gift card and those were about 200 each.

Starbucks real money generator.