We talked way back in 2021 about loosey goosey language in Citi’s Terms and Conditions that let you double dip sign-up bonuses on some cards. A lot of things have changed since 2021 (duh), and Citi games have changed slightly too. Let’s pick a particular card, like the stupidly named Citi AAdvantage Globe Mastercard, and dive into its Terms and Conditions:
- “bonus miles are not available if you have received a new account bonus from a [Citi AA Globe card] in the past 48 months”
- “bonus miles are not available … if you converted another Citi credit card account on which you earned a bonus in the last 48 months into a [Citi AA Globe card]”
So, you can’t get a bonus if you had one in the past four years from the same card, effectively. With that in mind, let’s go over a couple of Citi’s application rules:
- Must wait eight days between applications
- No more than two cards every 65 days.
- Bonus eligibility is attached at the time of application
With a card like the Globe, you’ve got four months to hit the spend bonus, which gives you time for apply for four cards within the first card’s bonus window. Specifically, you could apply on day 0, day 8, day 65, and day 74, and you’d still meet Citi’s application rules and have another 56 days before the bonus period on the first card is up. Once you’ve been approved for all the cards, which frankly is unlikely in-and-of-itself, you can hit the bonus spend on all four, and get the bonus four times. Wowza.
Now let’s talk about reality. Should you do this? Almost certainly not, because:
- AA bans users with too many bonuses in a year, and this will probably trigger it
- You’d have four new Citi accounts on your credit report in a couple of months
- Citi fraud analysts won’t like what they see if they look
- Other banks won’t like what they see if they look
- A single Globe card is generally a bad option, four of them is four times as many bad options
Ok, so the concept is cool in theory and bad in practice, why talk about it? Citi isn’t the only bank out there, and you may find that your local LardLand Credit Union in Lubbock, TX has credit card bonuses that work the same way, but don’t necessarily report to the credit bureaus. Now you’re in business.
Happy Tuesday!
More bad ideas in scale.