Category: Shenanigans

Update: Reader K let me know that PPK with a Freedom Flex worked at Costco.com, so we may be in a YMMV situation based on merchant or, perhaps based on cardholder.

The Chase Freedom and Freedom Flex Q4 5x categories are PayPal and Walmart, though I’m almost certain all of you already knew that. (Don’t forget to activate all of your Freedom and Freedom Flex cards at this link.) I had assumed this would be about the easiest time of the year to max out the $1,500 of 5x spend on my Freedom portfolio because with the use of PayPal Key, everything that accepts a virtual debit card would count as PayPal spend when a Freedom was backing the virtual debit card.

Well that was wishful thinking. It seems that Chase blocked all PayPal Key transactions on Freedom and Freedom Flex transactions starting on the first day of Q4 (Friday) for me, and for everyone else that I’ve talked to. Who wants to bet on when they turn it back on? My guess is January 1, 2022.

How do we pivot? It’s easier than you may think, though slightly harder than if PPK worked. Options:

  • Pay with PayPal at CVS. You could buy $505.95 worth of tic-tacs and aspirin three times I guess
  • Watch for deals on gift cards for resale at PayPal Digital Gifts, Bitmo, or Slide
  • Send money to your P2 using PayPal (the fees are about 2.9% though, so use this as a last resort)

Or, you could be basic and use it for your regular spend I guess. You’ll get the same 5x, but you’ll miss-out on the smugness of knowing that you beat the system.

Side note: I believe this is the first instance of Chase actively blocking something ripe for MS in a long, long time. That’s a troubling development.

Chase trying to force choke PayPal Key users.

Talk about a whirlwind day for credit card stuff:

1. A new American Express Platinum authorized user 20,000 Membership Rewards bonus link came into my inbox yesterday. It’s worth a shot to see if it works for you too. Login to your American Express account first, then click this link to see if you’re targeted. The bonus requires the authorized user card to spend $2,000 in six months. Of course I’d recommend adding the no annual-fee gold authorized user card instead of the platinum version.

Note: American Express authorized user cards arrive already activated and remain that way for 60 days, so you can spend the $2,000 without ever attaching a social security number.

2. My Citi Custom Cash card coded as a grocery store for certain manufactured spend techniques even though the same charges haven’t coded as grocery on my Citi Premier. So, if you’ve got a Custom Cash, forget what you know about Citi merchant coding and try again.

3. You’ve no doubt heard about yesterday’s announced Chase United Club Infinite card changes elsewhere. Don’t buy into the sales hype, but the changes make the card a good one in a few very specific instances. It might be a good card for you if you:

  • Fly United a lot*, and you value United Club access for all-you-can-eat cheese cubes (or for a less worthy reason)
  • Redeem United miles for domestic coach saver space a lot* (I’m unclear as to whether this applies to X award space only, or also to XN which is extra availability for elites and card holders)

Should that describe you*, the card’s United Club access and 10% rebate on domestic coach saver tickets can really add up to be worth more than the annual fee. If that doesn’t describe you though, skip this one.

4. Amazingly, the offer for American Express Business Platinum employee cards is still alive and kicking. As a reminder, you can get a 20,000 Membership Rewards bonus per employee for adding up to 99 employee authorized user cards and spending $4,000 on each. That’s a total of about 1.9 million Membership Rewards.

The downside? You have to talk to a human for this one. Call American Express’s Business Platinum phone number and ask “Are there any bonus offers for adding employee cards to my Business Platinum card?”

Pictured: An employee credit-card whirl wind.

* I’m terribly sorry

Background

If you set your way-back machine to March 18, you’ll find a post about taking an upgrade offer from an American Express Personal Gold or Green card for 25,000 or 75,000 Membership Rewards after $2,000 in spend and another 10x at gas and grocery stores for up to $15,000 in spend, good for 183 days. I know a few of you took the upgrade offer like me, and I got two notes in April and May to let me know that the points from this deal never posted for you, also like me.

Now fast forward to September 2 when the first report came in that the bonuses and 10x rewards started posting. A few days after that, messages started coming from all over the place confirming both the bonus and 10x. I checked my account and with zero surprise, the points had posted. It took a while, but the offer eventually came in like it was supposed to. If you opened yours after March 18, you may still have a day or two left to squeeze that juice by the way.

Working It

It’s of course great news that bonuses started posting, but there’s more to the story: a couple of weeks ago, upgrade offers for another 25,000 Membership Rewards and another $15,000 on 10x spend started raining from the sky on Personal Green and Gold cards in the offers section of the dashboard. As far as I’ve been able to tell, almost all Personal Green and Gold cards have the offer provided the card account has been open for at least 12 months.

Can you see where I’m going with this? If you have a Platinum card that’s been open for at least 12 months, call American Express and downgrade it to a Gold or a Green card, wait about an hour, then check for an upgrade offer. You’ve got an excellent chance that one will appear and you’ll get another 25,000 Membership Rewards and another $15,000 in 10x capacity. Bananas, right? There’s a similar play on the Business side too. Just don’t do this on a Platinum that had a retention offer in the last 12 months to avoid angering AmEx. Also, it may only work once on the Personal side and once on then Business side per person.

Oh, the spend bonuses and 10x are posting in a few days on these offers — you won’t have to wait five and a half months to see them. Save that way-back machine for looking at the old Schwab 1.25 cent cash-out.

Looking through the American Express Platinum way-back machine.

We’ve talked about Point.app on this blog more times than I’m comfortable with (I don’t think a single topic should get too much coverage), but given their propensity to transfer money from Venture Capitalists’ funds to your wallet via their app, it’s been a regular topic despite that discomfort.

What never made it onto this site, or any other public site that I know of, is that for a brief, amazing, short window, Point let you fund your account with any credit card with no fees, and you could then withdraw your cash via ACH or through other easy manufactured spend right away, given that it’s a debit card. The limits were high too at $10,000 per month, all fee free from Point. There was a rub though: while American Express cards didn’t cash advance, some Mastercards and Visas did.

How did it work? In April, they added an option to fund your account with Apple Pay, an option which still exists today with new restrictions. When that feature showed up in the app, they had language to the effect of “Instantly transfer up to $2,500 per day using a debit or credit card from an existing bank — for no fee.” They weren’t even trying to hide it!

With the help of a fellow hooligan, we tested several small loads with different credit cards and found which ones charged a cash advance for loading. Looking at the charge on American Express’s activity view showed that they were using Stripe to process payments, which is an interesting datapoint to keep in your pocket for looking at similar deals. After that, I maxed out the monthly limit and waited for the month roll-over for even more spend. Then sometime in June, credit card charges stopped working and eventually the language in the app was updated to remove “credit card” from the Apple Pay description.

Lessons to learn from this:

  • New financial technology companies and their cards often allow shenanigans because they haven’t thought about blocking them
  • Shenanigans don’t always work right away, sometimes a new feature enables them
  • Explore each funding opportunity available in a FinTech platform
  • Make a small test payment to see if something causes a cash advance when you find something that works
  • Use the information on your credit card’s activity view for your test payment to discern the likelihood of charges working on other cards, and cash advances aren’t always the cards that you expect
  • Go big before it dies, provided you don’t care if you’re eventually shutdown (I didn’t care with Point, though I wasn’t ever shut down)
  • Keep track of which payment processors are used to discern patterns for future plays

I can definitively say that there are other FinTech companies out there right now that let you fund with a credit card. Get out there and explore, and when you see a new product consider getting it to see what it can do.

Be like Dora, go explore!

PayPal has a targeted deal running for 10% back from Target. As you saw yesterday, the Point rewards debit card has a 10x offer running at Target now too. An obvious question: Can these deals combine for 20% off? The answer is probably, though nothing is guaranteed until the data-points start rolling in. So, here’s how I’d play this:

  • Verify that you’ve got the PayPal Target deal (search for “Target” at this link)
  • Save the offer to your PayPal account
  • Add your Point debit card to your PayPal Wallet
  • Use cashbackmonitor.com to find a smaller, unknown portal (unfortunately it’s slim pickings right now)
  • Add one of the following to your cart:
    • A $500 gift card (Disney, Home Depot, and Apple gift cards are your best bet for resale)
    • Groceries and home goods that you’d buy anyway
    • Game consoles for resale if you can find them
  • Checkout with PayPal, using your Point debit card as payment

Ok, easy enough. We likely just got 20-21% off based on whether or not the portal tracks. (Hint: smaller portals still occasionally track on things like gift cards at many stores even when the big ones don’t).

I’ve kinda buried the lead here though: with these two deals stacking, you can get 20-21% off of Disney park tickets (via a Disney gift card). That’s honestly almost unheard of and if Disney is in your future in the next couple of years, I’d hit this one. If you open multiple PayPal accounts, a personal plus one for each of your “multiple businesses”, you can scale this deal even more; but after the first $500 it’ll turn into a 10-11% back offer because you’ll use up your Point spend capacity. Of course you will be able to get some credit card rewards in place of Point.

As always, if you don’t have the Point debit card and want to get it, make sure you use a referral link for a higher sign-up bonus. (The best that I know of is currently $100 after spending $1,000.) I’d rather you use a friend’s referral link, but if you don’t know anyone who has one feel free to reach out to me and I’ll share mine.

Targeting Target: Just one step away from this nonsense.

Let’s roll with the punches today:

1. It seems that GoBank will no longer be the new blue(bird) as of October 31; they’ve sent an email to multiple cardholders indicating that the product would be shutting down. I haven’t seen one yet for my account, but I do believe the reports are credible. Unfortunately the replacement Go2Bank card so far doesn’t seem to be amazing.

Hint: Allow me to be Alec Baldwin with the phrase: “Always be probing.” You should always be probing reloadable debit cards on sale at Walmart. The fact this this one died doesn’t mean that there aren’t other alive options.

2. There are also multiple reports that American Express has clawed back the 4x bonus points from a prior offer this spring for referring a friend to a new card. Some reports suggest that this is true even when AmEx didn’t have L3 charge data (showing what you purchased). It’s unclear why the AmEx RAT team chose this promotion as their flex, but so far I wouldn’t stress about it too much with respect to other MS activities on AmEx cards. I genuinely don’t think it will lead to any further shutdowns.

3. Cash.app reloads stopped counting for T-Mobile Money’s monthly ten transaction limit, which unlocks 4% APR on balances of up to $3,000. (Personally, I like the HMBradley deal for 3% APR up to $100,000 a lot better, especially if you’re good at manufacturing very small direct deposits.)

Channel Alec Baldwin and roll with the punches.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Since around Autumn 2024, sometimes applying for more than three cards leads to approvals that are subsequently converted into duplicate apps. The haphazard nature of recent data-points suggests that it’s probably only happening when an underwriting rep manually reviews something, so some luck is involved if you’re applying for a bunch of the same type of card.

On Thursday I posted about a Bank of America trick or two. The post generated more questions than I thought, so let’s talk about how Bank of America credit card applications work (maybe not officially, but this is how it works in practice):

  • Bank of America will only make one hard credit pull a day regardless of the number of applications made
  • Personal cards will show up on your credit report once opened, business cards will not
  • You can be approved for multiple versions of the same Business card on the same day, just use multiple businesses with multiple EINs
  • Some business cards have a Visa and a Mastercard variant, and each is a separate product
  • Having $5,000+ in a personal Bank of America checking account will help make business applications sail through the automated approval system
  • As long as the credit line on a newly approved business card is greater than $5,000, you’ll likely be approved for another business card so just keep going
  • Existing business credit cards don’t affect your ability to earn bonuses or to be approved for a new application with the same card

Last week’s post also laid out a quick plan for maximizing BoA credit card applications and I followed it over the weekend. Here’s what I applied for

Spoiler alert, I was approved for every one of them.

Despite playing the game for over 10 years, I’ve somehow never had a personal Alaska Visa. If I had, I’d make sure it’d been a few years since I applied or perhaps picked a different personal card. At the time of applying, I had one Business Cash Mastercard and one business Alaska Visa open, and I had closed a second business Alaska Visa the day before to up my chances for the shenani-go-round. (Why yes, I did just make that word up, why do you ask?)

What’s the takeaway? Go big with Bank of America credit card applications.

A tee shirt that says "Go big or go home" with a drawing of a tricycle in the center.
Bank of America may be the tricycle of big-banks, but it’ll take you places.

It’s shaping up to be a great weekend for getting out there and ginning-up some spend. Alternatively, if you’re like me you’ve burnt out on manufactured spend after a week and a half of Kroger’s 4x Fuel Points promotion it’s a good weekend for chillin’. You decide:

1. Staples is selling fee free Visa Gift Cards again starting on Sunday and running through a week from Saturday, limit 5 per customer (or per transaction in most cases). Just make sure you have a liquidation method before you load up on these.

2. Simon Mall online is having a flash sale for 50% off of Visa gift card fees using promo code FSAUG50 through this evening. These are an interesting way to meet minimum spend for second tier banks (definitely not for American Express, you won’t earn points and the spend won’t count toward a sign up bonus). If by some miracle you have one of the card numbers for yesterday’s Bank of America shenanigans handy this could be a great way to run up a balance for payment shenanigans on those cards.

In case you’re not aware, you can get $1,000 face value Visa gift cards with your name printed on the front online at Simon. Frequent Miler has a good writeup here with the basics. As with the Staples, make sure you’ve got a path toward liquidation of these gift cards before going big.

3. Is your Brex cash card sitting idle? I’d understand if so, mine certainly was for quite a while. That’s changed though — I wanted to drop a reminder for those who might have ride-share like expenses, real or otherwise: Brex has been faithfully awarding 8x on ride-sharing services for me.

Brex has a new sign-up bonus of 80,000 miles (or $800 if you’d rather cash out) with $9,000 spend within a short 30 days. It has no credit check but does require a real business. Note that this link randomly seems to offer 7x on ride-sharing services. (Thanks to Rapid Travel Chai for the link)

4. M1 Finance has released their upcoming credit card’s rewards structure, and there are a few doozies for manufactured spend in there. You can see the full list here.

How I’ll be rolling this weekend.