Category: Shenanigans

Let’s talk today about what’s going on with our collective zeitgeist: Getting $10 off at Amazon when using $0.01 in Discover Cashback rewards PayPal Key has been officially made redundant by its corporate overlords; the is product going away on either April 20 or April 21 depending on which PayPal communication you believe.

I’m not sure that there’s ever a good time to get bad news like this, but it hurts even more coming just a few short days after the zigening. Let’s discuss.

Background

PayPal Key was launched in late 2020 as a weird attempt by PayPal to get into the middle of your credit card transactions for data harvesting and product stickiness. It gives you a virtual card number to use in place of your credit card and you can choose which credit card you want to actually be charged when your Key is used. Of course gamers are going to game, and it was quickly discovered that:

  • PayPal Key generated virtual card numbers with one of two BINs: 558158 or 520593
  • Companies like FinTechs, payment processors, tax processors, rent collections, and others often treated one or both of these BINs as debit card BINs

Why is that useful? Fees vary greatly for processing credit cards as compared debit cards. In extreme cases, debit cards might be 0% while credit cards have a 3.5% or higher surcharge.

What I’m Doing Now

There are definitely still plays out there that work, like the more-or-less-public plays for Public.app funding and rent payments. There are naturally several non-public plays too. One of the obvious responses to this news is to hit all of your plays as hard as possible while you still can. Before doing that though, consider the potential collateral damage of turning your PayPal Key shenanigans up to 11:

  • Your whole PayPal account could be shut down
  • Your underlying credit card(s) may be shut down from cycling or bust-out risk
  • The service you’re hitting may shut you down, locking you out of future plays

My initial instinct was to go as big as possible on my PayPal Key plays between now and the end of April, but I’ve tempered some of that enthusiasm to try and find a middle ground that keeps my cards and accounts alive while maximizing PayPal Key before it dies. I’d encourage you to do the same.

Let’s hope we all find the right middle ground so that we’re alive when the next deal surfaces!

PayPal’s Executive staff taking care of its P&L statement.

A popular and eerily strange idiom says “when others zig, you should zag.” You know the advice is good because it’s shared on LinkedIn all the time by random strangers and also Gary Kelly. (In case you don’t know the phrase, zig-zagging is going back and forth, so a zig is going one way and a zag is going the other way.)

Let’s bring this into context with the current unfortunate zig at Plastiq (from now on, let’s agree to call this the zigening). There were definitely multiple games being played, but one obvious variation was combining the Nearside Debit Card 2.2% cash back with Plastiq’s 1.85% discount from its normal 2.85% fee on debit cards for a net profit of 1.2% on payments. On Wednesday though, Plastiq started charging 2.85% which killed any deal potential.

So, let’s take the advice of internet randos and consider this an annoying opportunity to zag. Remember:

  • Nearside is not the only card out there
  • Plastiq is not the only way to pay bills
  • Bill payments aren’t the only way to effectively use a debit card
  • Different BINs behave differently in general

Happy weekend friends!

Weekend puzzlers.

It’s the second time this week for a grab bag of topics post. Hooray I guess?

  1. Do this now: Register for Wyndham’s current promotion, which gives you 2x on two night stays, 3x on three night stays, and so on up to 5x on five night stays.

    There is great value in Wyndham outside of the US (and a few properties in the US), and excellent value with Vacasa rentals booked with Wyndham points. As a reminder, Citi ThankYou Points transfer to Wyndham directly at a one-to-one ratio.

  2. If you have a Citizen’s bank account, check your email for a targeted offer of $150 back after two $500 direct deposits. As usual, use a business account that supports setting a memo field and set the memo to “Payroll” if you want to emulate a direct deposit. (Thanks to AbjectRaise)
  3. Kroger started a 4x fuel points on third party gift cards promotion yesterday and is running it through Tuesday, March 22. Fortunately, we’re past the beginning of the year lull in gift card reselling and spot-rates on major bulk gift card brands have crept up to make this a break-even deal or better, not including credit card rewards.
  4. You’ve got until Monday to apply for the $3,500 Capital One Spark offer (no link, you apply through any Capital One business relationship manager), or for the 100,000 point Capital One VentureX card. Believe it or not the first of those is much easier to get than the second.

    When I applied for the $3,500 Spark offer, the business relationship said to me: “We’re not like Citi, we don’t care if you spend, pay, spend, pay, spend, pay. We want you to spend as much as possible, then you make money and we make money.” I wouldn’t take that as gospel, but it’s definitely an interesting data point.

    Thanks to Allen and nutella via Slack for the reminders.

  5. Southwest has been rolling out schedule changes for June the last couple of weeks which means their schedule changes for July are likely to start next week. If you have a trip you want to book in July, you can pull the following stunt to try and get it for cheap:

    – Find the cheapest fare between your city pairs +- 2 weeks of your date of travel
    – Book the cheapest fare, and watch next week for a schedule change
    – Switch to the flight you actually want for no additional charge

    For a better shot at making this work, look for flight times that don’t exist in May or June but are still on the schedule for July.

Have a nice Thursday!

A Capital One business relationship manager coaches us on credit line cycling before going to jail.

Note: I’m now back from a disconnected vacation but still catching up. I hope to respond to everyone by the end of the day today though.

Let’s talk about a few interesting deals that have surfaced:

1. The Target Redcard debit card $80 sign-up bonus is back-again, (you get $40 off of $40 in-store and another $40 off of $40 online) with no hard-pull through March 15. As usual, you can churn this one during the promotional period and use a P2 to get the deal at least a couple of times for each person, see Target Redcard Hacks for more information.

Recent reports suggest that you should wait five business days between closing an old Redcard and opening a new one to avoid any hiccups.

2. Costco online is selling $500 Southwest and Alaska gift cards for 10% off. These may be ever-so-slightly interesting for gift card resale, but they’re definitely interesting if you’re looking at paid travel on one of those airlines anyway.

3. Kroger.com has $10 off of $150 or more in Visa and Mastercard gift cards using promo code MAR2022. Even if you don’t live in an area with Krogers you can still purchase these. The bad news? They’re not US Bank gift cards like in-store, but rather they’re Metabank gift cards processed by Blackhawk.

The other bad news? Your order will probably be cancelled if your account is less than 30 days old.

Any good news? Well, Metabank does issue different BINs.

4. There is potentially a $1,000 sign-up bonus for Chase Merchant Services according to Doctor of Credit. It’ll probably work, but there are caveats:

  • It may be targeted (but just ask if the offer is attached when applying)
  • If you play shenanigans with your Chase card portfolio, maybe skip this one to avoid any eyes on your accounts
  • Don’t run prepaid gift cards or your own credit cards through this account, find a trusted third party and use their credit card

Am I going to do this one? I honestly can’t decide. Also, who is asking me all of these questions?

Yup

Note: I’ll be on a mostly disconnected vacation this week, and while I’m still planning on posting M-F, expect slower than normal responses from me. If you do write a note though I will get back to you.

1. The Point debit card has 100x points (100% back) on payments to Hulu until March 20. Unfortunately the limit is $20. If you’re interested in the card, make sure you sign up through a referral link because otherwise the sign-up bonus is awful.

Related: The “one week only” sign-up bonus of $100 after spending $50 when applying through a referral link was extended through February 27, 2022, shocking absolutely no one. If you haven’t referred P2 for a Point app, that’s $100 for you and $100 for P2 for a $99 annual fee, so now is a good time to do it.

2. DDG reports that American Express Business Platinum offers are being widely mailed out across the US via USPS. The offers are for 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 another $1,000 within three months. These are no-lifetime language (NLL) offers to boot.

With AmEx physical mailers, it’s safe to use one for anyone at your address regardless of who the offer is addressed to.

Apropos of nothing, isn’t Your Name, Jr. a new hire at your company? No reason.

3. US Bank is sending targeted offers via email for 2,000 bonus points for adding an authorized user to your account and making a purchase. It was seen on an Altitude Reserve but could be on other cards as well. (Thanks to g2525)

Your Name, Jr.‘s employee ID photo.

Vinh at Miles Per Day is probably most notoriously known for being shutdown from just about every service out there, and if he avoids a shutdown there’s probably some restriction on his account in place instead.

The latest version in the saga of Vinh’s trek to shutdown with American Express involves clawed back upgrade bonuses, and that post mixed with a request from reader Rich for American Express upgrade and downgrade strategies leads to a discussion about a few American Express rules to live by, in order to avoid having your bonuses clawed back from the Rewards Abuse Team (RAT):

  • When you open a card and get a bonus, keep it open for at least 12 months
  • When you upgrade a card and get a bonus, keep it open for at least 12 months
  • When you accept a retention offer, keep it open for at least 12 months
  • Upgrading a card to a higher annual fee card is ok at any time, even within the first 12 months
  • It’s ok to accept an upgrade offer right after downgrading, but keep it open for at least 12 months
  • Downgrading a card is only ok after 12 months from one of the above events

See a pattern there? American Express doesn’t clawback bonuses provided you do the above. There is one well known clawback case, but it is singular in nature, was tied to a promotional uncapped grocery spend bonus, and had nothing to do with sign-up bonuses, retention bonuses, or upgrading and downgrading.

Now with that out of the way, let’s briefly discuss manufactured spend: American Express rarely shuts people down for manufactured spend, rather they give you a financial review if it’s excessive or just stop awarding points at a particular retailer, like Simon Mall gift cards. You can be more blatant with manufactured spend at American Express than most banks, so probe away.

Happy Wednesday friends!

AmEx only pulls these (checks notes) clawback tools out if the meat is less than a year old.

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.

1. People that know me well know that I like to mentally explore bad ideas even if I wouldn’t do them, and this item definitely falls into that category. So I don’t recommend you do this, but if you have both a Chase Sapphire Reserve and a Chase Freedom Visa you can come out ahead with $600 in travel credits on the $550 annual fee every year. To do so:

  • Spend your Sapphire Reserve $300 travel credit
  • Downgrade your Sapphire Reserve to a Freedom Visa for a prorated annual fee refund
  • Upgrade your other Freedom Visa to a Sapphire Reserve, pay a prorated annual fee
  • Spend your new Sapphire Reserve $300 travel credit

I think that there’s a distinct possibility that shenanigans like this will get you axed by Chase and I wouldn’t do it, but it’s worth illustrating because the same thing will probably work at other banks with other products that you care a lot less about, and learning the trick could come in handy in the future. (Thanks to discussion over at reddit for pushing me in the right direction)

2. Reader Mark passed along a 2022 version of the American Express Pay Over Time offer for 20,000 points, make sure you check all of your charge cards for eligibility. Additionally, make sure you’ve disabled Pay Over Time on your charge cards at this link to have a shot at being targeted in the future if you weren’t on this round.

As with most (but not all) American Express bonuses, plan on holding the card for 12 months if you take a Pay Over Time bonus offer.

American Express and Chase are like two peas in a pod hotdogs in a bun.