In Ready Player One, Wade ends up as an indentured employee for IOI because he deliberately gets himself arrested by their credit officers.

He does this by changing the financial records of his alter-ego Bryce Lynch so it looks like he owes IOI $20,000. Wade sets out to get himself arrested so that he can hack into the Sixers' database at IOI headquarters. The Sixers are a professional squad of killers who came disturbingly close to assassinating Wade when he was attending a birthday party on planet Neonoir for Ogden Morrow. In hacking into their database, Wade is able to download incriminating evidence of IOI's nefarious activities.

This is only possible because he changed his identity and altered his financial records to make it look as if he owed a lot of money to IOI. He knew that the corporation would respond to his debt by making him an indentured employee, making him work for nothing to pay back what he supposedly owed them. Then, he'd be in the heart of IOI headquarters, ready and able to hack into their computer systems and cause them a whole bunch of trouble.