Some people find clever ways to go around the rules.

In this story, a man entered a radio station contest where the person who sends the most emails wins concert tickets. He created a program to automate sending millions of emails to the station, but it didn’t work out the way he had hoped.

Read the full story below.

Early 2000’s Radio Contest: Whoever sends the most emails wins concert tickets!

This is something I did back in the early 2000s.

A local radio station launched a contest to give away tickets to a Britney Spears concert in LA.

I had no interest in Britney Spears, but I had friends in LA that I wanted to see.

Contest rules: Whoever sends the most emails to the DJ at the radio station over the weekend wins. I mean, it was the early days of the internet, and things like this happened.

This man found a way to automate sending emails to win.

Malicious compliance: I wrote a simple program that sent out a bunch of emails per second from my home computer and left it running. I don’t remember the exact number of emails per second.

To be fair, though, I was trying not to be so malicious that I crashed their email server, because I wanted my emails to be counted so I could win.

I remember from my logs that I sent many millions of emails while the contest was running, so it was probably close to 100 per second.

I had a counter running and would include the counter in my email subject line, something like: “Email Contest Submission #15,323,726.”

But the station did not like what he did.

Fallout: On Sunday afternoon, they announced on the radio that the contest was over early because their email server kept crashing, and asked people to please stop sending emails.

The DJ responded to one of my many, many emails, asking me personally to stop. He told me that he didn’t have the tools to delete so many emails and had to request special help from their ISP’s IT department. He added that he got in trouble with his manager, and he insinuated that I was a mean-spirited person for automating something that was clearly meant to be hand-crafted emails and for causing him so much trouble.

He also told me I came in second place.

Looking back, I should have added a few more zeros to the number of emails I sent per second.

Well, he technically didn’t do anything wrong.

Other people are sharing their thoughts in the comments section on Reddit.

Here’s a similar story.

Here’s a genuine question from this person.

Another user shares an interesting experience.

Here’s an idea.

And lastly, here’s a valid response.

They don’t like it when you figure out how to beat the system.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a woman who is ready to file for divorce after she found out her husband drained their savings to buy an old car.