Remember all those times that your math teacher said “you’ll need to know this stuff when you’re an adult, so pay attention”? For me I guess that turned out to be true, but that was really a function of becoming a physicist and not because it was intrinsically necessary to survive as an adult.
It turns out that having some basic numerical sequence analysis skills can be useful though. For example, let’s look at American Express offer URLs for possibly defunct pay over time links:
- https://americanexpress.com/activatenow38
- https://americanexpress.com/activatenow39
- https://americanexpress.com/activatenow40
See the sequence there? I’d squirrel that one away and try different variations of the last two digits every couple of months for the foreseeable future. Chase operates the same way:
- https://www.chase.com/mybonus/ink2q422
- https://www.chase.com/mybonus/inkq422
In Q1 of next year we’ll probably see inkq123 and ink2q123 for example. We can probably replace ink with hyatt, united, ihg, southwest, or marriott (shudder) too.
This trick works on offers, bonuses, applications, and in plenty of other places too, so always be probing.
The next bank anti-gamer strategy: The Fibonacci Series.