Thank you all for the replies! Lots of good tips and yes, Loophole was probably not the best way to describe it. Anyways, I wanna take a moment and celebrate the very first time a thread I started reached page 2 on the forum. hahah

again, thank you all!

So far I've tried the Canada routing and it definitely has some cheaper fares from there, though, not sure it can justify a $300-ish positioning flight?
LAX-LHR-LIN runs around $3700 in april. Vancouver-LHR-LIN is about $2900, so significantly lower but once i have to account for $300 positioning flight, not so much. Plus LAX to Canada is about 3 hours, not really a short hop.

I'll try via Mexico!

When I tried from smaller cities within US, the price difference wasn't that much lower unfortunately.