Buying gift cards through giftcards.com is a favorite past time for manufactured spenders, especially because it’s an easy way to hit portal spending bonuses. Things have been going swimmingly for me with the site since portal terms and conditions were updated in November 2022 to allow for cash-back on up to $2,000 per order, rather than the prior $2,000 in aggregate per month; or at least they had been going swimmingly until April 11.
On April 12, orders stopped tracking across all portals for a majority of manufactured spenders that used the site regularly. For others though, everything continued to track and the difference wasn’t clear. As far as I can tell, two things happened on that day:
- Giftcards.com implemented new anti-bot measures, usually manifesting as a puzzle slider
- They built an internal “cash-back ban list” and put big users on it
Since I pretend to be a scientist, I spent a few weeks trying to decide what exactly had been banned by placing dozens of orders through different portals, each changing some combination of personal information, technology, and credit cards. The result was they seem to have banned users by:
- device (cookies and browser fingerprint)
- ip
Changing one of these things wasn’t sufficient to fix tracking, but changing both of them was. So, if you’re having issues with order tracking on giftcards.com, find your way to a new IP and device profile. Your email accounts, name, addresses, and other personal information doesn’t seem to matter.
Happy weekend friends!
Next up: How to ensure that 21 pounds of onions for $7 will post correctly at Meijer.