Category: Points

  1. Giftcards.com continues to award 5% off of virtual Visa gift cards with the promo code CYBERSAVE. It’s supposed to end today but often these keep going well beyond their stated expiration (and just as often they expire well before their stated expiration, because reasons). Make sure you bounce through a shopping portal first, and you may be luckier than you realize if your order is canceled.
  2. The Aegean Airlines free miles game has been kicking around since Friday, but it’s become quite a bit more interesting in the last 24 hours: many new accounts are seeing high mileage awards in the 20,000 miles or above range. Why is this useful? Two reasons:

    – 25,000 miles is enough for a roundtrip economy flight on United Airlines or Air Canada between any two North American cities
    – 90,000 miles is enough for a roundtrip business class flight on United Airlines or Air Canada between North America and Europe

  3. Reader H wrote in to let me know that American Express gift cards are fee-free using promo code HOLIDAY2022 (including gift cards well into the 5 figure range). There are two uses for this that I see:

    – Shift minimum spend
    – In conjunction with AmEx offers at amexgiftcards.com

  4. A new Kroger 4x fuel points promotion starts today (in theory), and presumably includes online gift card purchases too. They’re also selling several travel gift cards at a net discount, and you’ll earn at least 2x and possibly 4x fuel rewards on these purchases:

    – Uber: Buy a $200 gift card and get a bonus $25 Kroger gift card
    – Delta: Buy a $100 gift card and get a bonus $10 Kroger gift card
    – Airbnb: Buy a $200 gift card and get a bonus $25 Kroger gift card

    If you buy all three of these and use approximately 15 gallons when you fill your car, the fuel points are worth about $30. (Thanks to GC Galore)

  5. According to Doctor of Credit, Office Depot/OfficeMax stores have a promotion for $15 off of $300 or more in Mastercard gift cards. If this promotion is like other recent variants you may even be able to do better than $15.

A manufactured spender readies for the holiday grind on a United flight to Lubbock, TX booked with Aegean miles.

  1. Do this now: Register for Hilton’s Q1 promo for 1,000 bonus points per stay and double points on all spend associated with a folio including room fees for stays through April 30, 2023.
  2. Staples has a fee free $200 Visa gift card promotion running Sunday through the following Saturday, limit eight per transaction. These are Metabanks so have a liquidation plan before you load up; there are plays out there, both online and in person.
  3. Apparently Turkish Airline’s promotion for 30% off of economy and business class awards for travel through May 2023 excluding U.S. Cities isn’t actually excluding U.S. Cities because programming is hard, so book quickly if you have any United or other Star Alliance travel planned before it’s fixed. UPDATE: DDG provides an example of SEA-FCO pricing at 30% off, but CitizenKane notes via MEAB slack that there’s a separate promo for SEA and maybe there’s no actual bug here. (Thanks to DDG)
  4. Reader Mark wrote in to let me know that Bitmo, which is continuing it’s slow death spiral via rocket launch into the ocean, is issuing gift cards for redeemed points if you email support and wait for a few weeks for them to come through. I’d still stay away from their new company HungryFriend (in this instance I think they’re the hungry friend).
  5. American Express has a 30% transfer bonus from Membership Rewards to Virgin Atlantic miles through December 29. Award sweet spots:

    – Business class on Delta to Europe
    – Business class and first class to Japan on ANA

    Unfortunately there’s no current transfer bonus to Virgin Galactic, but if there were maybe Bitmo would have had a better shot.

Have a nice weekend!

The rocket Bitmo used to launch its company to the moon; spoiler alert, it missed.

  1. Giftcards.com has a promotional code (BFVIP) that in theory gives you $5 off of a $100 virtual Visa gift card, but in practice gives 5% off of $250 virtual Visa gift cards on up to $1,500 per order because reasons. The promotion runs through tomorrow evening.

    Since virtual gift cards at giftcards.com have a $2,000 per rolling 48 hour limit, I’d get $1,500 in one order and then another $500 immediately after. Don’t forget to use a portal.

  2. It probably should go without saying, but if you hold any serious cash at a crypto based FinTech companies it may be time to reconsider whether the manufactured spend bang is worth the increasing risk of loss, especially because Coinbase, a favorite FinTech of Christmas past, may become the next casualty. Tread lightly! (Thanks to George via MEAB slack)
  3. EDITOR’s NOTE: I wouldn’t normally write about a deal for a warehouse club because it’s not directly about travel, miles, points, or shenanigans, but this one is different because Sam’s Club is often a great vendor for a manufactured spender given its propensity for gift card deals and portal games.

    Sam’s Club has a holiday promotion for $50 back on your first in-store purchase with a $50 membership, making a new account fee free with promo code 27Y9X. Unfortunately though gift cards are excluded from the first purchase $50 back. If you sign-up, try and use a portal because it may track (usually with portals and stuff like this, the weirder the better).

  4. Bilt cardholders earn double rewards between Friday and December 1. I’d typically say go nuts on this deal like Sam Bankman-Fried did with corporate FTX funds, but with this card you’ll probably get the axe for too much MS if you do. So instead, maybe just go at the speed that Sam Bankman-Fried runs to keep your account alive.
  5. A new pre-targeted no-lifetime language American Express Business Platinum link has surfaced with a sign-up bonus of 150,000 Membership Rewards after $15,000 in spend within three months and another 10,000 Membership Rewards for adding an employee card and spending $1,000, also within three months.

    If you get one, don’t forget about the triple dip. (Thanks to TwelveBall)

The reason SBF was running away.

Introduction

Historically speaking the time between the second week of November and Christmas has been the biggest volume for manufactured spend in the year, at least during my career. That’s because:

  • Buying lots of Visa and Mastercard gift cards is temporarily normalized
  • Most stores run first-party holiday gift card promotions
  • Big gift card sellers run third-party holiday gift card promotions
  • Consumer electronics and other hot items for buyer’s groups are well stocked and often on sale
  • Nit-picky cashiers and customer service representatives are too busy to worry much about what you’re doing

If you want to participate in the gift card or buyer’s groups holiday manufactured spend cluster-hug, this weekend is a great time to get signed up with the major players so you have a liquidation channel and deal alert notification flow.

Gift Card Buyers and Resellers

In no particular order, most volume in third party gift cards flows through one of these buyers, all of which are considered generally reputable in the community, and I’ve checked with all of them and they’re ready to on-board for the holidays:

Buyers Groups

The following buyer’s groups are considered generally reputable in the community, and if you sign-up this weekend you should be on-boarded in time for black Friday:

Let me also offer some unsolicited advice: While you’re figuring out how buying groups work, stick with deals from Amazon and skip the other stores which can often require some voodoo to get working properly.

Good luck!

A manufactured spend prepper’s closet.

  1. Do this now: Link your Delta SkyMiles and Starbucks accounts for 500 SkyMiles and 150 stars after making a purchase with Starbucks before December 31, and then ignore all the fluff pieces you’ll see about the partnership in the next week; other than linking there’s nothing here worth your mental bandwidth.
  2. The American Express Business Gold 130,000 Membership Rewards sign-up bonus after $10,000 in spend in three months is now available via referral. As usual with American Express, to find the best offers:

    – Try multiple browsers
    – Connect to a VPN
    – Check mobile and desktop
    – Check with incognito
    – Check logged out and logged in

    And if it wasn’t a referral offer, you should also try arriving at the bonus landing page by searching for “American Express Business Gold” on several different search engines and clicking the first link.

    The current best referral offer I know of gives 30,000 Membership Rewards and an additional 4x on travel and transit for three months on up to $20,000 in spend for the referrer, which potentially makes this offer a total of 110,000 additional Membership Rewards for the referrer on top of 130,000 Membership Rewards for the referred (!).

  3. US Bank has a $500 bonus for a new personal checking account using promo code 2022OCT, provided you haven’t had a personal checking account at US Bank in the last two years or received a US Bank banking bonus in the same timeframe. The requirements:

    – Fund the account with $25
    – Direct deposit at least $6,000 twice (see The Daily Churn for ideas on fake direct deposits)
    – Enroll in online banking

    If you’re not in US Bank’s footprint, open a brokerage account with them and you’ll then be eligible for a checking account and bonus. (Thanks to DoC)

  4. Check your Chase offers for 10% back on Southwest purchases, up to a total of $50 back. This is reportedly available even on Chase co-branded Southwest cards.

Where the Starbucks Delta news belongs after you’ve linked your accounts.

  1. New American Express Pay-over-Time 20,000 Membership Rewards links, make sure to leave Pay-over-Time enabled for 120 days to avoid any penalty boxes:

    – https://americanexpress.com/activatenow38
    – https://americanexpress.com/activatenow39
    – https://americanexpress.com/activatenow40
    – https://americanexpress.com/activatenow41
    – https://americanexpress.com/activatenow42

    Any guesses about what the next link will look like? Yeah, me neither.

  2. Check your American Express offers for $50 off of $100 or more at Dell for purchases through October 20. You can stack this with another offer for 10% back, and with the Business Platinum’s $200 credit for a net of $275 in spend.

    As of this writing Dell is also 10x at Rakuten, meaning you’ll get 2,750 Membership Rewards or $27.50 cash back on top of the credits.

  3. Do this now: Register for Hilton’s Q4 double elite qualifying night promotion.
  4. The Chase Ink Premier card is now available for online applications. The sign-up bonus is $1,000 after $10,000 spend in three months, and the annual fee is $195. The card earns:

    – 2.5% cash back on purchases of $5,000 or more
    – 2.0% cash back otherwise

    Unlike other ink cards you can’t transfer the points as Ultimate Rewards to another premium Chase card, so this is a pure cash-back play. The Bank of America Cash Rewards family of cards are effectively 2.625% everywhere cash-back cards with Preferred Rewards, so in general those are better options for anything other than the sign-up bonus.

  5. Simon.com/volume has 72% off of purchase fees on Visa and Mastercard gift cards. The usual warnings with these: these are Metabanks, American Express won’t award cash back or points for Simon transactions, and never feed the mogwai after midnight.

For some reason my computer isn’t giving good results when I try and compute the pattern of Pay-over-Time links.

  1. In case you missed the Royal Air Maroc deal, Gary points out a new way to get AA lounge access for a big discount: You can buy Qantas Club membership for about $250 USD this week only, and that also gets you and a guest access to AA lounges when flying AA.
  2. Capital One Shopping‘s mobile app started offering 8% cash back at giftcards.com on Saturday, and it’s still alive. Last month there were no effective limits with cash-back paid out on that portal, and presumably this month will be the same.

    You don’t need to be a Capital One account holder for Capital One shopping, it’s available to anyone.

  3. Check to see if any upcoming IHG paid bookings could be converted to award nights at less than 0.5 cents per point. If so, consider taking advantage of the IHG points sale here for 0.5 cents per point and then rebook your stays as awards. (This is where I’d normally say something about a budget IHG hotel in Lubbock, Texas, but I’m trying to grow.)

The secret note passing device between guests and housekeeping at the Staybridge Suites, Lubbock, TX. I guess old habits die hard.

[For those of you outside of Kroger land, general principles about tackling problems may still be applicable.]

We’ve talked about the strange state of Kroger Fuel points several times this year, but there are new developments that warrant yet another one of these posts. Unfortunately things aren’t great and nearly every heavy-hitter manufactured spender that was utilizing fuel points in their strategies has had accounts irrevocably locked and lost at least a little money as a result. The updates:

  • Kroger now seems to have a dedicated team seeking fuel points abuse
  • Kroger is reaching out to some heavy hitters by email, asking them to explain the account
  • Accounts are being locked in near real time while loading, and it seems to be triggered by back-to-back purchases
  • Kroger is finding ways to correlate accounts, apparently even by the purchasing credit card
  • Kroger has shutdown an account mid-redemption

So, if you still want to play the game, you need to stay under the radar. That means:

  • Get a new IP address before creating or accessing an account (some ideas here)
  • Use a new incognito window when creating or accessing an account
  • Use a new credit card number when buying (AU and employee cards can help)
  • If you do back to back transactions, use multiple cards and Kroger accounts
  • Load fuel points at a drip over several days
  • Redeem fuel points back-to-back, as quickly as possible if outside of your own geography, or as a slow drip if within your own geography

The window is very much closing on this one, stay safe!

The Kroger fuel points marketplace.