Hacking robinhood.io's Waiting Queue

Robinhood.io, the $0 commission stock brokerage, opened up for pre-registration recently. When I booked a spot for myself there were 121K odd people in front of me in the waitlist.

The page also read “Interested in priority access? Get early access by referring your friends. The more friends that join, the sooner you'll get access”. There was my unique referral link at the bottom.

I visited the pre-registration page using my referral link and entered my alternative, abandoned email address. I have moved up by 6000 positions in the waiting queue. The site just needs me to give another email id to move up the queue. No confirmation email is needed.

Now I know the way to move up the queue. I need few more email ids. I don’t want to share my friends’ email ids with them. At the same time I don’t want to enter random email ids as it may alarm them when delivery starts to fail for more and more email id corresponding to a referral link.

I have subscribed to email lists like linux-kernel, git etc. where we get spams mail occasionally. I opened up my spam folder. Entered all the spammers’ email id one by one.

Now there are only 555 people ahead of me in the queue and 121K odd people behind me.

Thank you fellow spammers ☺

Edit: And days after robinhood.io has changed their waiting list policy. Now they require you to activate the request through an email link, which is pretty good. Now there is a fair waiting list ☺