Category: Wisdom

Until you’ve graduated to the point where sign-up bonuses don’t really move the needle, one of your primary churning goals ought to be “always be working on a sign-up bonus”. Specifically, a starting level of this hobby is:

  1. Open a new card with a sign-up bonus
  2. Spend either organically or with manufactured techniques until you hit the spend target
  3. Start over at (1) immediately

Sign-up bonuses are typically worth a 10%-50% rebate on your spend, so don’t worry about category bonuses until you scale up. If you’re worried about 5/24 or other similar issues, focus on business cards, and especially business cards at small banks and credit unions until you graduate to a higher manufactured spend tier.

Happy Tuesday!

PS: Yes, “Always be working the sign-up bonus” isn’t nearly as sexy as “always be probing”, but that doesn’t mean it’s unsexy.

This weird 3D rendering’s message is on-point.

Background

The Chase Sapphire Preferred has had an increased sign-up bonus of 100,000 Ultimate Rewards after $5,000 spend in Chase branches since Monday of last week, and now the same offer is available directly from Chase.com. But there was another new development yesterday: Affiliate bloggers now also have links for the card.

The Impact

As you can imagine, this development means that the number of articles about the card shot up exponentially. Let’s sample a few headlines from the 12 hour period starting yesterday at 10AM Eastern and ending at 10PM Eastern:

  • “Is the Chase Sapphire Preferred worth the annual fee?”
  • “Who’s eligible for the Chase Sapphire Preferred’s 100,000 point bonus?”
  • “Record-high Bonus: Earn 100,000 points with the popular Chase Sapphire Preferred for a limited time”
  • “Chase Sapphire Preferred benefits: Everything you need to know”
  • “The best Chase credit cards to add to your wallet”
  • “10 best ways to use 100k Ultimate Rewards points: From first-class flights to all-inclusive getaways”

Affiliate bloggers can be insatiable. Now, can you guess how many different blogs it took to generate that many articles in 12 hours? The sad punchline is that it took exactly one blog. There were dozens of other articles from other blogs that could have made the list; but there was literally zero need. We got 1/3rd of a page of headlines from just a single blog.

The Motivation

Obviously the main goal for an affiliate blogger is to maximize revenue. There are two ways that they do this:

  • Maximize revenue in the short term by dumping articles incessantly to reach as wide of an audience as possible
  • Maximize revenue in the long term by being a “good neighbor” affiliate blogger that always [usually] gives you the best link, so you’ll trust them and keep coming back to use those links for months or years

The former strategy relies almost exclusively on creating urgency, and while it’s not directly required for the latter strategy, urgency still boosts revenue so the strategy is still a core tenet and at minimum a subtle part of the game.

The Defense

Urgency breaks our best plans, and a false sense of urgency leads directly to mistakes in the hobby, like:

  • Not waiting another week a referral offer to come up with the same bonus (it probably will)
  • Accidentally blowing through 5/24, 3/4/5, 2/90, or some other credit card rule because we’re worried about missing out
  • Forgetting to have your credit report in a clean state before applying
  • Not analyzing whether the Sapphire Preferred even makes sense
  • Being annoyed about the contents of your RSS feeds and writing an article about the deteriorating state of churning blogs

Look, affiliate bloggers aren’t inherently evil and you should use an affiliate link for someone that you appreciate and want to support when it’s the right card, the right time, they haven’t steered you astray, and no referral option is available. But until you’ve made that analysis consider whether you should avoid the noid noise. Also, ain’t no affiliate links ’round MEAB so that option isn’t ever real.

Taking time to consider problems before acting works.

There are often reasons for a churner to control how balances report on a credit report, for example: utilization can directly affect your ability to get cards and loans with banks and credit unions. Aside from the obvious method of paying balances right before statement close, there are a few other hacks for controlling what’s reported:

  1. Chase: Anytime you pay a Chase card down to a $0 balance, it’ll report to the credit reporting agencies the next banking day
  2. American Express: You can call the number on the back of your card and ask a representative to report your balance mid-cycle, it typically reports two banking days later
  3. US Bank: They’ll report your balance on the first banking day of every month regardless of statement close date
  4. Citi: Because #citigonnaciti, make a request via fax (ask your parents if you don’t know) at (866) 713-5028, and they’ll report two to three banking days later
  5. Synchrony: Cause a fraud alert on your account, they’ll report your balance the next banking day, and no, this isn’t MEAB sarcasm

Happy Thursday friends!

Citi’s credit reporting department IT server room.

Foreward

The churning community has a number of wanna-be-but-not-quite-seedy underbellies, and since early this week all of them circulated a hacked Chase Sapphire Preferred 100,000 point sign-up bonus link repeatedly. The hacked link beats the current public offer and is therefore somewhat enticing, but the public offer will be the same as the hacked link starting Monday. Its imminent irrelevance didn’t stop the link from finding its way in the last couple of days out of the underbellies and into the mainstream community via forums, reddit, and several blogs though (I’ve purposely not linked to any of them).

Hacked and Modified Links

Churning has a storied history with hacked links, and most of that history is buried in lore and old discussion forums that are partially or totally obscured from the public eye and google’s crawlers. We can pick a couple examples for the sake of discussion that are well known though:

We could also pick dozens of cases in which hacked or modified links shared in churning circles paid the bonuses as expected, never lead to shutdowns, and generally worked really well for plenty of people.

On Safety

Strictly speaking, nearly all hacked or modified links don’t lead to a shutdown; you’re probably safe to use them when you encounter them as long as you can stomach the remote probability of a bank adverse action.

But, what makes the difference between a hacked or modified link that will get you the axe and any other hacked or modified link? My guess is that a critical mass of applications, bonuses, or specific marketing campaigns showing up on a bank’s KPI dashboard when it’s not expected is often the trigger. Again, leaning on the two cases from above:

  • In 2016, the 100,000 point Platinum card sign-up bonus was one of the most pervasive events in the churning community, largely because a six figure Membership Rewards sign-up bonus hadn’t been available to the public ever prior to the leak. Blogs talked about it, forums talked about it, meetups talked about it; it was like a Woodstock event in the churning community.
  • In 2020, The unlisted Ink links had been used successfully by a small group of churners for nearly a year. When the link became public via reddit and major blogs though, the number of applications and applicants exploded and the bank took notice. (In a note of irony, the small group of churners made the link public to try and hide themselves in a mass of applications.)

So, I’d wager that the safety of a hacked or modified link is inversely proportional to the number of applications approved using those links as a general guideline.

Finding Bad Links

How can you tell if a link has been modified or hacked? It can be hard, but there are a few telltale signs that often are good indicators:

  • People call it an “unlisted” or “black car” link*
  • For American Express: The landing page doesn’t have a login request and the application doesn’t have a “Next” button, everything is on one page
  • For Chase: You can’t find the same bonus or offer on any public landing page, via advertisement, or co-brand website
  • Also for Chase: APRs are listed as fixed and no mailers with the same offer have been seen
  • A blogger says something like “this is a hacked link”

What about other banks? So far, they haven’t cared in a meaningful way, so I guess it’s fine?

Good luck friends, and have a nice weekend!

* Black car seems to have originated from a bad translation from Chinese churning forums, but somehow is now part of our vernacular. (The correct translation was probably “unlisted”.)

A hacker uses a black car to make a link.

If you search Perplexity for “What are American Airlines miles worth?”, you may get a range of numbers from 1.0 cents each to 2.5 cents each and a lot of hallucinated reasoning behind those numbers too. If you repeat the search, you’ll probably get a different result. Valuing miles is hard, even for AI. So, often we revert to one of the hobby’s normal methods:

  • A mile is worth the value of selling it on the grey market
  • A mileage redemption is worth the cash that you would have paid without the miles
  • A mileage redemption is worth the cash price that the ticket or property is listed for
  • A mile is worth 1.0 cents, because most programs let you redeem at that level
    A mile is worth your opportunity cost for acquiring it

Those are all fine and good, but sometimes you need a legally defensible valuation for a mile as part of a settlement, tax action, corporate valuation, or similar rigorous process, and the above answers typically won’t cut it because of logical holes big enough to fly an A380 through. Also, judges in particular hate it when you’ve got a hand-waivey answer with variability left up to the eye of the beholder. So, let’s reintroduce a mileage valuation that’s easily defensible:

  • A mile is worth what the program will sell it to you for

Right now, I can buy 10,000 AA miles for $338.63, so for the purposes of a legally defensible valuation for miles, AA miles are worth 3.3863 cents each.

Happy Wednesday!

Yes, there’s another common way to determine mileage value.

An often overlooked technique for dealing with sludge in churning is sending a Certified Letter via USPS. Since the friction of sending one involves typing something, printing something, stuffing something, licking something, driving to something, paying for something, and then waiting days for something, it doesn’t happen very often.

But when a company gets a Certified Letter, you’ve effectively guaranteed that a human with some decision making power will read it and decide what do do about it because Certified Letters are often precursors to lawsuits, and it turns out companies don’t like lawsuits (probably because they don’t fit as nicely as tailored suits.)

Certified Letters have helped me after customer service failed repeatedly, in just the last year, they’ve helped me fix:

  • Credit card disputes
  • Credit report disputes
  • Locked gift cards
  • Missing bank bonuses

Remember, the value of fixing something is often worth the value of a good churn.

Happy Thursday!

More stuffing, because apparently people want shirts like this?

The CFPB is effectively non-existent 🪦, which means that when a bank holds your money and shouldn’t, doesn’t award a bonus when they should, changes credit card terms in an illegal manner, or sends all of your personal details to an adult website owner, you don’t have an easy, central resource for fixing it. You still have tools at your disposal to help though (ordered by of likely ease of use):

  • Your state banking regulator and charter administration
  • The BBB
  • Your state banking commission
  • The FDIC for banks or the NCUA for credit unions
  • State small claims court
  • The OCC (ya down with OCC? yeah you know me!)
  • FTC
  • Arbitration (most banks have these clauses in their paperwork, and they’re almost always obligated to pay for the arbitration too)

Don’t shy away from the arbitration option when the numbers get into five digits, if the bank obviously behaved incorrectly your odds are probably great.

Happy Wednesday!

OCC’s current official coffee mug.

Let’s discuss a fictitious small town, Lubbockito USA, and use it to illustrate a point:

There are six restaurants in Lubbockito:

  • Subway
  • SideShowSubs #233
  • McDonalds
  • Burger King
  • Carls Jr
  • Rob’s Special Burger

Let’s say you’re a restauranteur and want to bring Lubbockito a new option, hoping to cash in on the Lubbockitizen’s wallet share. There are two right answers for what new restaurant to open:

  1. A sub or a burger joint, because that’s obviously working and people seem to like those
  2. Anything other than a sub or burger joint, because that “obviously working” market is well done

In churning, there are parallels for credit cards, bank accounts, bonuses, loyalty programs, and plenty more. If you find yourself uninspired with the Chase Banks, Walmarts, Wells Fargos, and Hyatts of your world, take a look at the options that you aren’t hitting. There’s plenty there.

Happy Monday!

Did you know? Rob’s serves hotdog shaped cheeseburgers in Lubbockito.