Gift card fraudhas beenrunning rampant at US grocery stores this year. Kroger, BlackHawk, and Pathward have been making changes to make fraud harder recently, and that’s especially escalated in the last several weeks. Updates for gift card buyers:
The newest batches of BestBuy and Apple gift cards are now geo-locked to the store they were shipped to (they won’t activate at other stores, and this locking applies to different stores in the same chain in the same city)
Older stock bulk gift card brands like HomeDepot, BestBuy, and Apple are slowly being removed from Kroger’s POS terminal software so they can’t be activated
Visa gift cards are going away at some stores, replaced by higher fee Mastercards with better tamper proofing
New gift card packaging now includes the phrase “This package is the property of BHN until purchased”
Kroger has installed new one-way gift card hangers in some stores that only allow removing cards from the hanger, but don’t allow putting them back
I think it’s safe to assume that geo-locking and better gift card inventory management will spread to other gift card brands quickly, and it’s also safe to assume that BlackHawk Network (BHN) is actively working on language and tamper measures to improve their legal position when fraud and theft take place.
– $50 off of $750+ in online spend – $70 off of $1,000+ in online spend – 200,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points with $750+ in online spend – 250,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points with $1,000+ in online spend
– Infinite: 80,000 Avios after $5,000 spend in 90 days, plus uncapped 6x at restaurants and 2x everywhere else – Signature: 60,000 Avios after $3,000 spend in 90 days, plus uncapped 4x at restaurants and 2x everywhere else
You might want to care because Caesars Diamond gives an annual, free four-night stay at Atlantis provided you gamble for four hours during your stay, but there are smaller benefits like show tickets, no resort fees, and free parking at Caesars properties too.
– Gateway: 30,000 miles after $1,000 in three months, no annual-fee – Explorer: 60,000 miles after $3,000 in three months, $95 annual fee is waived – Quest: 70,000 miles and 500 PQP after $4,000 in three months, $250 annual fee – Club: 90,000 miles after $5,000 spend in three months, $525 annual fee
Only the Club’s bonus gives enough miles for a one-way long-haul partner redemption from the US to Europe or Asia, which should tell you something about the actual value of these cards especially as compared to an Ink. Each card does get you XN award space access, which is great for domestic economy awards I guess. Each card also earns an extra 5,000 bonus miles for adding an authorized user within the first three months. (Thanks to DDG)
One of my favorite travel tools is seats.aero, a site that shows you inventory for award flight redemption availability across about a dozen mileage programs. It’s got limitations in that data is only available for certain routes, award discounts for elites and card holders aren’t included, data isn’t refreshed for hours or days depending on which searches have been run, and plenty of other small things too. But the tool is perfect for illustrating a concept in churning and travel hacking: By finding your perfect redemption, sometimes you also find someone else’s perfect redemption.
Background
I was looking for space to open on an international First award, and while I generally knew about when award space opened up on the potential routes that I wanted to fly, I wanted to fine-tune the timing with fresh data-points. So, a few weeks before when I thought the route would open:
I looked for where inventory was opening up on the routes I might take, using seats.aero and a couple of airline partner’s mileage programs
I saw that the routes I wanted usually opened up the morning US time, and usually 3-5 days out
I also saw that seats.aero wouldn’t see inventory right away, exactly as expected given how it works
My takeaway was that at five days out, I needed to search for the inventory I wanted every couple of waking hours, but especially in the morning.
The Ouchee
Starting five days out, here’s what happened:
T-5: No inventory
T-4: No inventory
T-3: No inventory
I did have a backup flight booked on British Airways, so there wasn’t a concern about getting home, but it’s British Airways. So late on the evening of T-3, let’s call it approximately T-2.5, I used seats.aero to look at business class availability on major routes from Europe to my preferred US airport to see what my best options were that weren’t British Airways.
Seats.aero showed plenty of cached results for my search, and I began investigating those on different airline websites. While I was exploring, seats.aero was running a real-time search in the background in another browser tab. I kept exploring and saw a notification from seats.aero pop-up, but because I’d just looked for space and it wasn’t there, I assumed the alert was for some other route that I was also monitoring.
Fast-forward a few minutes later to when I looked at the alert. It was for the flight and route that I wanted! So, I confirmed the space with a partner airline’s award search, then started to book it. But, the space vanished before I could complete the booking.
What happened? I’m certain that someone else had a seats.aero alert for the same route that I did, and they got the same alert after my real-time search showed that space had opened. Because I delayed by a few minutes, they got the flight before I did, and they found out about the flight because of me too.
The Band-Aid
I was annoyed at myself for a couple of minutes, but in my research I found that when one route had award availability open up, other routes usually did too. Since I’d only searched for one airport, seats.aero had only refreshed its inventory for that airport. No other alerts for other routes had likely gone out.
I searched my second best airport option, and First space was open there too. I booked that instead and got (mostly) the redemption I wanted.
The Takeaway
When you use a tool like seats.aero, PointsYeah, point.me, or Award Tool, that alerts based on the results it finds, you might trigger alerts for your competition too. When space really matters, consider skipping those tools and use airline award sites directly.
Of course the concept applies to manufactured spend, churning, and other branches of travel-hacking too, the implementation is just slightly different.
I have two favorite old-school niche travel blogs, TravelBloggerBuzz and The Free-quent Flyer. One of the interesting insights from the latter, from way back in 2016, was about manufacturing small transactions with Plastiq. At the time, Plastiq’s transaction fees were percentage based and didn’t have minimums so you could send a very small payment and pay a $0.01 fee for it, a perfect way to manufacture transactions.
Plastiq fixed the small payment nearly zero-fee transaction years ago, but Gideon at The Free-quent Flyer set up scheduled transactions through the year 2026 before the minimums kicked-in and those transactions are still going under the old fee structure.
There’s a lesson here, especially because we just had another niche payment method go away this week: Whenever you can schedule your games to continue into the future, you probably should find a way to do so. If you played your cards right, you may have years of shenanigans ahead of you even after something dies.
Good luck, and remember: I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian cause I care.
Warning: You can go too far with manufacturing transactions, but on the other hand I never saw a Plastiq hat.
The Smartly card is a 2-4% everywhere uncapped cash back card, with the cash back amount determined by the assets held in either a Smartly savings or a self-directed investment account. $100,000 average funds over 90 days in either is enough for 4%, and you have to have a Smartly savings account open even if most of the assets are in an investment account to qualify.
– 5% back on British Airways through November 29, up to $45 back – 10% back at Renaissance Hotels through November 18, up to $75 back – 10% back at Fairfield Inn through December 1, up to $38 back – 10% back at Westin through December 1, up to $68 back
Gamers gonna blah blah blah gift cards at the front desk or blah blah blah blah something else. (Thanks to Mike at Cheapskate Travel)
Many car reservations don’t require a credit-card to hold
You can hold multiple car reservations, even at the same company
We can take throw each of the above into a blender and come up with a couple of strategies for getting a the car class you want, hopefully without paying extra.
The Strategy
The mechanics:
Book cancelable reservations across several major companies
Book the car class that you really want directly for 30 minutes after your original reservation
Cancel the other reservations when you’ve got the car you want
When you show up at your destination, look in the company’s app or on the car lot for the type of car you want, and grab the one that has the best option. If you have multiple reservations with multiple companies, you’ll generally find something good. Assuming the best option doesn’t exist though, you can always fall back on the reservation booked in step 2. In practice, you probably won’t have to fall back often though.
Good luck friends!
Sneak preview of a future “Will it Blend?” episode: Hertz Lawsuit Papers.
Alaska is sending targeted applications for either 80,000 or 100,000 MileagePlan miles for the Bank of America Alaska personal card with $4,000 and $8,000 spend required, respectively. Look for the email subject: “Earn up to [80,000 or 100,000] bonus miles + Alaska’s Famous Companion Fare™”
MasterCardGiftCard.com has fee-free purchases through the end of November with promo code NOFEES24. You won’t earn points and spend won’t count toward sign-up bonuses with first party AmEx cards at any Incomm site.
These are Incomm gift cards.
I have an aversion to the blogosphere’s growing need to post random churning related rumors, especially when the rumor’s source is single comment on reddit from someone with little to no post history. At best these are wrong half of the time, which I guess means half of the time they’re right? (For the second time this week: No I’m not bitter, you’re bitter!)
Sometimes though there’s a rumor that: (1) has enough noise behind it that seems to be more than just echo-chamber repeats, (2) has big enough consequences that most churners ought to know, and (3) makes complete fiscal sense for the company involved; a rumor that meets all three criteria is that US Bank may sunset new Altitude Reserve applications early next week. I’d suggest giving the rumor and your churning needs a few minutes of consideration.
Have a nice weekend!
Bread that’s more fully cooked than the majority of churning rumors.
