I’m sure you’ve seen it elsewhere but in case you haven’t, Frontier is buying Spirit. What color do you get when you mix Frontier green with Spirit yellow? I can’t imagine it’ll be pretty. Anyway, here are a few items for your Tuesday radar:

1. PSA: US Bank Visa and MasterCard gift cards have all had their PINs reset by US Bank, presumably due to rampant fraud. Plan on calling or registering the cards online to set a PIN before using them. These cards are versatile but holding them has always been like holding a live grenade; fraudsters are good at draining them after you buy. Hopefully this move helps. (Thanks to Put-Grouchy)

2. Simon Mall has 75% off of gift card fees (including the $1,000 denominations) using code 22HAPPY75. These are Metabanks so make sure you have a liquidation plan.

3. There’s a 20% transfer bonus from American Express Membership Rewards to Hawaiian airlines. Sweet-spots:

  • Coach awards between Hawaiian Islands (7,500 points one-way)
  • Virgin Atlantic Business Class/Upper Class to Europe 125,000 (points round-trip)
  • East coast to Hawaii in Business Class (40,000 points one-way)

Now, by show of hands how many of you still have Hawaiian miles left over from when their portal worked for all purchases at Amazon? Keep that in mind before deciding to transfer miles; they’re not worth anything if you never redeem them.

4. Check for an American Express offer for $100 off of $300 at Delta. For tips on turning this into a longer term airfare credit, see this post, the same techniques will apply.

Spirit yellow mixed with Frontier green, which coincidentally also demonstrates how I feel when I “get to” fly one of those airlines.

There was a Monday post here, but it was removed after several asks from interested parties (the concern was about repercussions from a dead deal). We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

Thankfully it’s time to sail into the weekend with a few positive notes after a strange week:

1. Two new no-lifetime language (NLL) links for the American Express Business Gold have surfaced, if you’ve had the card before it’s worth checking to see if you’re targeted. The limit on American Express charge cards is currently 10 or 11 per person, depending on the person. Why depending on the person? #noidea

These offers are for 90,000 Membership Rewards after spending $10,000 in three months. The secondary play here is to watch for an upgrade offer to the Business Platinum for another 100,000 or more Membership Rewards, which could come as early as one statement after opening. (Thanks to tehflip499)

2. Are you a Hyatt person? Me too, but generally Hilton is a good program for churners and big redemptions as well, especially because churning American Express cards is as easy as pie (because apparently pie is easy). It’s almost certainly worth your while to learn a bit about it.

To that end, American Express has increased offers on its Hilton cards:

  • 70,000 points on its no annual fee card (think of this as about 30,000 Hyatt points)
  • 130,000 points on its $95 annual fee Surpass card, which is great for manufactured spend (think of this as about 60,000 Hyatt points and a bonus free night certificate for spend)

As with item (1), the secondary play here is to watch for an upgrade offer to a Hilton Aspire card, but those are rarer than Business Platinum upgrades, and they may require calling in or chatting to discover that there’s an offer on your account.

3. Sigh, Staples has a fee-free Mastercard gift card sale starting on Sunday and running through Saturday, February 12. As usual, the limit is five per customer, but in practice that really means five per transaction. Always try and run at least two transactions back-to-back to minimize the time you have to spend at a store that focuses on selling recycled printer toner to the elderly and repeatedly tries to turn the office supply retail space into a monopoly.

4. The gift card resale market has gone pear-shaped in the last several days with BestBuy resale rates dipping to below 93% and Kroger fuel points spot prices jumping to above $19.50 per 1,000 points. As usual if the rates you’re seeing aren’t at least $19.00 per 1,000 fuel points, look for another use or another buyer. Don’t settle for less.

Have a nice weekend friends!

Staples’ high quality aftermarket toner strikes again.

Let’s start today with a friendly warning: If you see headlines about thousands or millions of PayPal account shutdowns, don’t stress, you almost certainly weren’t involved and don’t need to follow the click-bait. The shutdowns were focused on accounts that generated thousands or tens of thousands of referral bonuses using bot-farms.

Here are a few things that are worth focusing on:

1. Hot on the heals of yesterday’s devaluation, we have, err, another devaluation. This time it’s ANA, which doubled its fuel surcharges for award tickets.

The ANA fuel surcharge is actually tied to the price of oil which turns out to be a novel concept in the airline world, and with oil prices jumping, the surcharge had a corresponding jump. So in addition to setting award alerts with ExpertFlyer, now apparently we should set crude oil price alerts with Yahoo finance.

2. American Express has a new targeted link for a 30,000 Membership Rewards bonus when turning on Pay Over Time. As always, consider shutting off Pay Over time on all of your charge cards to be targeted in the future. (Thanks to Matthew via DoC)

3. Check for a targeted spend offer on your Chase United cards at this link. This offer is very Citi Shop Your Way-esque in its detail: You earn 250 bonus miles for making three purchases over $50 each per month, for February, March, and April, and another 750 miles if you make all three months. (Thanks to DDG)

4. The offer for 70,000 SkyMiles, $200 statement credit, and first year’s annual fee waived for both the personal and business American Express Delta Gold cards is back. To trigger it, make a dummy booking for a cash domestic ticket in incognito mode and you’ll see it on the payment page. (Thanks to geauxcali)

Four fingers for the Thursday Quad.

Let’s get a little meta today:

1. In manufactured spend, usually deals don’t outright die. If they do die, they usually come back in a subtlety different way, like Season 6 Buffy. In just the last couple of weeks we’ve seen several examples:

In fact, most of my best plays have been taking advantage of a deal after it died, or at least after everyone said it did (and some time passed). Always be probing.

2. Emirates devalued their business class awards without warning yesterday. Any time your points currencies are parked outside of a flexible bank ecosystem like Ultimate Rewards, ThankYou Points, or Membership Rewards, they’re subject to unannounced devaluations that can make US dollar inflation look extremely tame in comparison.

At this point, the only time I’m directly acquiring airline miles other than by flying on a paid ticket are:

  • Credit card sign-up bonuses
  • As a byproduct of spending for status
  • Shopping portals

The devaluation risk of collecting them through any other method is too high for me. Because banks are subject to banking regulations and enforcement action from the Federal Reserve, FDIC, New York state, and potentially the SEC (to name a few), the likelihood of an overnight devaluation by 35% is small, and if it were to happen we’d likely see changes previewed months in advance.

Happy Wednesday!

Goggles to help you find deals that aren’t really dead. Ok, they’re not strictly necessary but they make you look cool, trust me.

Fortunately there’s still plenty going on with manufactured spend even though gift card resale prices still stuck in the sewers. Here are a few goodies:

1. Chase Merchant Offers has an offer for 10% back on up to $250 in spend at BestBuy now through March 3rd. Resale rates are at round 93% though, so I’d hold off until closer to March to get a higher rate.

2. There’s a better version of last week’s monster credit card offer for $3,000 back with Capital One: it’s $3,500 instead of $3,000 back if you apply through a business relationship manager (you can call a Capital One branch and ask to speak to their business relationship manager if you don’t already have one). Reportedly approval standards through a relationship manager are lower than if you applied for the public offer.

Side note: You can freeze one or two credit reports with Capital One and still get approved, just make sure you leave TransUnion unfrozen.

3. American Express Offers has $100 off of $400 in Delta flights booked through AmEx travel by March 31. (Thanks to batrick)

4. The most unsung of all the Unsung Hero credit cards, the no-annual fee Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card, is sending out targeted offers for 5% back on “online shopping” spend up to $100 as long as you spend $1,200, and the credit is once per month for three months, for a total of $300 cash back in addition to normal spending bonuses. Other variations have been reported too:

  • 12,000 ThankYou Points per month for $800 in spend
  • 10x ThankYou Points per month for between $1,200 and $1,300 in spend (thanks to Katie)
  • 5% back for spending at least $800 online, up to $90 cash back

I’m sure there are other offers too. Mine came in with the subject line: “Matthew, a limited-time offer just arrived. Activate now.”

5. Meijer MPerks is giving $50 back on $500 in third party gift cards in the form of a grocery credit for your next visit through February 12. Ok, technically it’s $5 back on $50 up to 10 times but you can knock it out with a single gift card.

Of course you should have multiple MPerks accounts to take advantage of this one, and double check that your gift card isn’t excluded (notably Apple is excluded, but BestBuy and Home Depot aren’t).

How did Sears (pictured) bring us this and the Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard at the same time?

Foreward: I apologize in advance for what’s coming. It kind of just happened in the first paragraph and then, well, you’ll see shortly.

1. Delta Platinum and Diamond medallions should make sure they’ve selected their Choice Benefits for the 2021 medallion year by the end of the day. (Confusingly, 2021 medallion year Choice Benefits are for status earned in 2020.) Tonight at midnight these choices turn into a pumpkin.

2. Check the dashboard of your American Express Green and Gold personal cards for an upgrade offer of 75,000 Membership Rewards after spending $6,000 in six months and +5x points for up to $15,000 in spend at supermarkets, gas stations, and restaurants. In case you do math like a pumpkin, that means 1x+5x, or 6x. (Thanks to bewhoaleavemealone)

3. Kroger.com has $10 off of $150 in Visa and Mastercard gift cards using code JAN2022 now through Wednesday. Unlike the physical US Bank cards that Kroger sells in store, these are Metabanks and are processed by Blackhawk Network, so liquidation is a bit tougher; you may have to resort to buying pumpkins for resale.

4. Kroger stores are running a 4x fuel points sale on gift cards starting Wednesday and running through February 8. Bulk gift card resale markets still look like a rotting pumpkin though, so while normally a 4x fuel points sale like this would depress the market value of Kroger fuel points, I don’t expect that to happen this time.

potato
Be glad these aren’t pumpkins.

Introduction

Stockpile has been a bastion of manufactured spend opportunities since at least 2017; let’s count some of the ways:

Underground MS

Even when all of the above died there were still several non-public ways to load Stockpile, including:

  • With a credit card masked by some digital wallets (when correctly configured)
  • Using certain widely available gift cards that Stockpile treated as debit

With the above methods, you could load $6,000 per week per payment method per player, and you could do even better if you bought anonymous Stockpile gift cards too. Well, all of that came crashing down earlier this week like it was BeachBody stock, with a new $100 per rolling 24 hour purchase limit with any card for funding your account. Currently the only way I know of to get more volume is via ACH, which obviously is a non-starter for manufactured spend.

Lessons

It’s no secret that I love FinTechs for manufactured spend, and lessons from Stockpile apply to other companies:

  • Try everything when a platform takes cards (Credit cards, gift cards, rewards debit cards, digital wallets, crowbars, etc)
  • Limits can be per-funding type
  • Limits can be different than advertised
  • There are often backdoor ways into scaling
  • When a company has been good for MS and something dies, that doesn’t mean stop probing, a very patched ship probably still has a leak somewhere

Have a nice weekend and go pound those FinTechs like you’re Gallagher and they’re watermelons.

A car bumper that's broken but held together with shoelace stile stitching.
Stockpile’s repair job to keep credit cards and gift cards out of its system.