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Take Pictures of Fake Pizzas to Get a Free Pizza from Domino's

Domino’s data gathering app can be easily fooled.
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Image: Flickr/Ben Sutherland

High speed pizza delivery is a competitive business. Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Papa John's are in a state of perpetual war, each trying to one-up the other with bizarre promotions. Domino’s latest scheme involves users taking pictures of their pizza and reporting its qualities to the Domino’s app. Taking pictures of pizzas earns points users can cash-in for food. The pizza giant will take info on any pizza at all—even its competitor’s.

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But Domino’s app doesn’t work well and can’t distinguish between a real pizza, a picture of a pizza, or a crudely drawn MS Paint image of a pizza. Scanning in a fake pizza and filling out a brief survey will net the app user 10 points. It takes 60 points to get a free pizza and users can only scan in a fake pie once a week. So, it’d take six weeks of scanning bullshit pizzas to get a free one from Domino’s and you’d still have Domino’s app on your phone, doing god knows what. According to Domino’s privacy policy, its app tracks everything from your device’s location, data harvested via your phone’s microphone, and uses “a variety of tracking technologies that may be included in mobile applications.”

Dominio’s competitor &pizza has set up a website dedicated to trolling Domino’s, describing the fake pizza picture scheme, and providing potential customers with an obviously fake pizza picture they can send to Domino’s.

A redditor discovered that the app would accept a simplistic picture of a pizza as a genuine pie, but a rival pizza place weaponized it. “Domino’s will hook you up for eating competitor’s pizza,” the &pizza run website said. “But apparently their app can’t tell a real pizza from a fake pizza. So here you go. Eat their pizza, just don’t pay for it.”

We tested the app on &pizza’s crude digital pizza picture on the Domino’s app and it worked. The app accepted the badly rendered pie as a genuine pizza then asked us questions. Did it come with sauce? No, it’s digital. How was the cheese? Non existent. The survey complete, the app applied ten points to our Domino’s account. Five more weeks of scanning fake pies and we can get a free pizza.

Domino’s is no stranger to dumb viral marketing campaigns that blow up in its face. In September, 2018, it posted an offer on Russian social media saying anyone who got the Domino’s logo tattooed on their body would receive 100 free pizzas over the course of their life. So many people took the company up on the offer that Domino’s shut down the campaign, but it’s still on the hook for hundreds of free pies. The pizza giant’s latest marketing stunt, while still dumb, is less of a disaster.