The Dark Side of Disney - Leonard Kinsey [41]
“Or you could even use the low-volume ones the next day, as I did by mistake. Assuming you’re only going on low-volume rides you can collect upwards of 7-8 FPs throughout the day and use them all the following day after getting a single FP at the ride you want to go on over and over!”
I’ve also seen people selling FastPasses for Toy Story Mania later in the afternoon, when all of the FPs are gone for the day. People are standing there scalping them for $10 each, assumably already having gone on the ride a few times earlier in the day, and guests are flocking to buy them! If you have a family of 5 and can sell your FPs for $10 each you’ve almost paid for a park ticket. The passes do say “non-transferable” on them so technically this is illegal, but probably such a minor offense that the CMs won’t enforce it.
Refillable Mugs:
This one is hilarious because it seems to piss so many people off. They get banned from message boards for being frothing-at-the-mouth batshit mad that other people are abusing the system to get free soda. Oh, the horror!
It’s so simple it’s hard to even call it a scam. The resorts all have mugs for sale at an inflated price that can be refilled as often as you want for the length of your stay. Guests will save their mugs and bring them back on their next trip so they can continue to get free refills without paying for another mug. There are accounts of people using 7+ year old mugs that are all worn down and disgusting, instead of simply paying another $12.50 for a new one! On top of that, a quick eBay search reveals that you can even buy someone else’s used, scratched, dirty refillable mug for a fraction of the original cost, or sell yours after a few years and make back a portion of your original “investment”.
As of this writing Disney doesn’t crack down on this scam at all, although recent reports suggest that soon chips might be implanted in the cups, and they’ll have to be scanned at the soda fountains before any soda will dispense. If the info on the chip doesn’t match the date of your stay, no soda for you! However, it seems as if the cost of implementation of this system vs. the savings from cracking down on soda scammers would not balance out, so I think this is a rumor that won’t ever come to fruition, and people will continue to use the same refillable mug for decades to come.
Pin Trading Scams:
Pin trading has got to be the stupidest hobby ever. They’re too small to be very enjoyable from an artistic perspective, they serve no functional purpose, and they’re insanely overpriced. However, the biggest reason for the extreme hate I feel for these pins is that they clog up the auction listings on eBay. If I do a search for Epcot, for example, literally ¾ of the listings will be for pins. So I always have to add –pin –pins to the end of my searches to weed them out.
But that speaks to the popularity of the damn things. And anything popular will eventually become the subject of a scam! This one comes from Tricia, a sweet, innocent-looking Orlando resident with a heart of coal. Her scam isn’t exactly clever, but it is funny because it shows the lengths people are willing to go through to acquire these stupid little pieces of plastic and metal.
“I go to the parks every weekend, and after seeing how crazy people go over pin trading I realized it was ripe for exploitation.
“So I did some research and found that ‘Hidden Mickey’ pins were both popular and somewhat rare. So I bought the cheapest, most generic set of pins I could find off of eBay, and then went around one day at Epcot and traded each of those pins with Cast Members for Hidden Mickey pins. At this point I’m out $12 and a day of my time.
“The next day I go back to Epcot, knowing that all of the Hidden Mickey pins are gone from the CMs lanyards. So people are getting desperate trying to complete their collection by the