Man accumulated 1.2 million airline miles in most unusual way after exchanging 12,000 cups of chocolate pudding

David Phillips is ‘The Pudding Guy’ who executed one of the most legendary frequent-flyer hacks in history and earned an incredible amount of airline miles.

Phillips exploited a loophole that allowed him to accrue enough miles to travel for free for decades.

He did it with a genius move that was so simple and yet so clever.

Unsurprisingly, no one will ever be able to do this again, though.

How Phillips became known as The Pudding Guy

In 1999, David Phillips identified a loophole in a promotion run by a company called Healthy Choice.

Back then, the company offered 500 airline miles for every 10 bar codes mailed in.

There was also an early bird bonus of 500 miles if you emailed 10 bar codes within the first month.

So far, so normal, but Phillips realized that individual pudding cups – each with its own bar code – only cost $0.25.

In doing so, he could purchase 1,000 miles for just $2.50 – the equivalent of 10 cups – at a time when those miles were valued at roughly $50.

And that’s not all.

He took it one step further.

How he ended up with millions of airline miles

Phillips bought 12,150 individual cups, worth around 1.2 million miles.

He spent $3,140 to buy those cups but – here’s another genius move – he actually managed to make some money back.

Phillips realized there was no way he could physically peel 12,000 labels by himself, and so he donated the pudding to the Salvation Army in exchange for the labels.

There were three advantages to that.

One, he did some good by donating food; second, he shared the workload; and third, this counted as a tax write-off of around $815.

He earned just over 1,253,000 miles, the majority of which he used with American Airlines, instantly giving him AAdvantage Gold status – not to be confused with the AAirpass.

Sadly – for the rest of us – these things are no longer possible.

Airline miles still exist, but these programs are always tilted way in favor of the airlines.

There are no loopholes and no caveats – if you want frequent-flyer miles, you have to actually earn them.