First, a warning: If you’re playing the Kroger fuel points game, use care when creating your accounts and vary all details as much as possible, more information and tips will be coming in the near future as the dust settles. With that out of the way, there are a few items for the weekend:

  1. Do this now: Register for Hilton’s new Q3-Q4 promotion for double points between September 6 and December 31 on all stays and an extra 2,000 points per stay when checkout isn’t on Saturday or Sunday.
  2. The Bank of America AAA card was a sleeper card unless you really knew how to hack it, and when you did know it was good enough to be in the queue as a future MEAB Unsung Hero. Unfortunately, for the second time in a month we’re losing a Hero. This one is moving to Comenity bank and changing its reward structure. The new card will offer uncapped 3% cash back at grocery which great at first glance, but it’s still a big downgrade from the BoA version. (Thanks to Sideshowbob233)
  3. Staples has fee free $200 Mastercard gift cards from Sunday through the following Saturday, limit 8 per transaction (instead of the usual recent limit of 5 per transaction). They’re Metabank gift cards so have a liquidation plan in place. (Thanks to coole106)

And finally a status update for the, *checks notes*, zero of you that asked: I took a voluntary denied boarding for $1,000 on my short, hour-long flight home last night with a replacement seat leaving this morning. Sounds great, right? Well, the airline put me up in a Four Points (Marriott) property. The property is almost completely empty, but I still got a base room on a floor under construction, a room type that wasn’t booked because those rooms were under construction, a view of a FedEx truck parking lot, and the restaurant and fitness center closed because of course construction (#bonvoyed).

Did I come out ahead between the airline and the hotel? Almost certainly, but it still feels like a gentle kick in the pants, which I believe is the sweet spot that Marriott Bonvoy strives for so bravo Marriott.

Have a great weekend friends!

Ok, so this wasn’t my Four Seasons hotel, but it is a Four Seasons hotel.

  1. The IHG flash sale from a week and a half ago is back, most properties are again pricing at about half off for award redemptions. In related news, Holiday Inn Express stays continue to be dubious at best as far as I’m concerned.
  2. Kroger has $10 off of $150 or more in Visa and Mastercard gift cards online using promo code DEALDAYS2022 through August 30.
  3. As of this writing, Dell is 10x at Rakuten or 11% cash back at TopCashBack, which makes it a great time to burn your second half 2022 Business Platinum $200 Dell credits. (Thanks to Miles)
  4. Kroger is having another 4x fuel points promotion on third party gift cards Friday through Tuesday. Clearly the person who builds Starbucks stores across the street from other Starbucks stores has moved on to Kroger IT.
  5. The Albert debit card has a targeted offer of $500 for enabling direct deposit and receiving $500 or more in direct deposits for 90 days. To see if you’re eligible, open the Albert app and look for a promotional banner. Note that Albert has a $150 bonus for both the referrer and referred, but no sign-up bonus directly; so be sure to use a referral for new accounts. (Thanks to Nate via MEAB slack)

The mastermind behind this mess is now evidently working at Kroger.

  1. The Synchrony Rakuten card (a nearly defunct MEAB Unsung Hero) is being converted to a 2% cashback everywhere Mastercard. This is interesting for at least two reasons:

    – You can cycle Synchrony cards to an extent without being shutdown (unlike the Citi Double Cash for example)
    – Synchrony is offering a $100 statement credit after $1,000 in spend within three months

  2. Do this now: Register for Hyatt’s Q4 promotion for double points on all two night or longer stays between September 15 and December 20, and double elite qualifying nights at several Caribbean all-inclusive resorts. (Thanks to iheartpoints)
  3. HSBC has a $500 new checking account bonus. To get the bonus, you’ll need an aggregate of $10,000 in direct deposits for three months in a row, but with HSBC almost anything counts as a direct deposit so an ACH of $1,000 in and out 10 times is probably enough to trigger it. HSBC will charge fees without a big balance after 6 months, but you can have your bonus and convert or close the checking account long before that takes effect. (For getting “legitimate” looking direct deposits without actually using an employer direct deposit, check out Episode 28 of the Daily Churn Podcast)

    Miles was the first to note that this bonus now has a once per-lifetime language, but my somewhat educated guess is that HSBC doesn’t enforce that.

  4. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard (another MEAB Unsung Hero) has been sending out another round of targeted spend offers through September 14, including:

    – $70 statement credit after $1,000 in spend
    – $70 statement credit after $2,000 in spend
    – 10,000 ThankYou points after $1,2000 in spend

    There seem to be other variations of these too, and on this round some registrations are coming via USPS mail rather than email, so keep an eye on both your mailbox and your inbox.

Happy Wednesday!

Not to be outdone by HSBC, Vantage West brings a compelling checking account offer to the table, literally.

  1. OfficeDepot Office Max has $15 off of $300 or more in Mastercard purchases through Saturday. Don’t forget to link your cards to Dosh for an extra 2% back and try for multiple transactions to minimize time spent at the overpriced dinostore (or is it dinostaur?)
  2. Stick with me on this one: Avis has a rather interesting promotion for 20,000 Etihad Guest miles when renting an intermediate or higher class car for three days between September 1 and November 30, but you have to book by tomorrow evening.

    You can earn the bonus three times, and that’s interesting because 50,000 Etihad miles will get you a business class ticket on AA from North America to Europe, and 62,500 is enough for a business class ticket on AA from North America to Japan. At my local airport weekend rentals seem to be the cheapest, and three day weekend rentals through the promotion portal in September and October are about $208. So, I can buy a business class ticket to Europe for $624 and still have miles to spare. (I will be doing this if I can, but so far I’ve been getting payment failures)

  3. Do this now: Register for your customized United MilePlay offer. My offer was 3,900 bonus miles for taking a trip by September 30 that costs at least $200, which pairs really well with cashing out AmEx Platinum credits to TravelBank.

The UK Avis Point of Sale system.

Giftcards.com has a negative cost promotion running through September 11th for 5% off of the total cost of eVisa gift cards using either promo codes EOS5 or ENDOFSUMMER, which brings the total cost of a $250 eVisa to $243.45. Given the long duration and potential for scale, let’s go in depth with this site’s peculiarities:

  • Purchase limits of e-gift cards are $2,000 per rolling 48 hours per account (The T&Cs say 24 hours, but we all know that T&Cs don’t match reality much of the time, right?)
  • Most portals will pay out on no more than $2,000 in purchases per month per giftcards.com account (The CapitalOne portal currently has no total limit language but it’s too young to know how it’ll behave at above $2,000 in spend)
  • The T&Cs say there’s a limit of $1,500 in gift card purchases or $75 off per account, but again T&Cs often don’t really match reality
  • Orders under $1,000 in gift card value will track on portals very quickly, while orders of $1,000 and up will often take a couple of months to track

Given the above, how do we scale?

  • The site seems to track accounts to the same person by address, email, IP, and phone number so switch those up for new accounts (notably, they don’t seem to track by cookies or credit card numbers, and sometimes the IP tracking is minimal)
  • Their system seems to have a public records verification lookup in the backend, so keep that in mind when messing with addresses and names
  • Keep track of your rolling 48 hour spend and order again when the time is right
  • Consider a particular portal burned for payouts for the entire month when you hit $2,000 in spend through that account, unless perhaps CapitalOne Shopping really has no limits (note that via the Capital One Shopping mobile app the payout is 6% versus 3% on the website)
  • Place your gift card orders in under $1,000 face value increments for better shopping portal tracking

Sometimes Giftcards.com will make you feel like Don Quixote and decide that it doesn’t like an email address, a physical address, or a credit card and your orders will be cancelled every time. When that happens there’s nothing you can do but move on to the next iteration and try again.

These cards are Metabank gift cards so have a liquidation plan. These e-gift cards are often easier to liquidate at home than their physical counterparts, but your mileage may vary.

Pictured: Tilting at windmills can actually work; or, not all quixotic endeavors are quixotic.

Introduction

In early 2021, a churning favorite payment processor and US Bank partnered to offer up to $5,000 in fee-free payments to new accounts when using a US Bank credit card through the end of the year. At face value, this was a nice way to meet a credit-card spend bonus and move on; but if that were the whole story we wouldn’t be talking about it today, right? Enter IT.

Bad IT

The software development team’s job was essentially to:

  • Look for US Bank credit card BINs
  • Add up all payments made with those BINs in a counter
  • Don’t charge fees while the counter is less than $5,000 and the BIN is US Bank’s

The developers did something like this, but they messed up the last step; instead of not charging fees when the card is a US Bank BIN, they didn’t charge fees unless the card was a US Bank BIN. So, as long as you never used a US Bank credit card, the counter would always be less than $5,000 and payments were fee-free. Those experienced with web browser DevTools could even see the counter in backend website requests.

The payment processor figured out their coding error on September 22, 2021 and the promotion worked as originally intended from that day forward. It probably goes without saying, but some churners were able to get quite a bit of volume through the lifecycle of the bug, and it was a sad day when the hole was plugged.

Lessons

What can we learn from this? A few of these are MEAB classics but there are some specifics too:

  • Always be probing
  • T&Cs aren’t always implemented or enforced
  • Try looking outside of a partnership for partnership promotions
  • If you know how to use web browsers’ DevTools, look at what’s going on under the hood
  • When a company gets basic logic like this wrong, they’ve probably gotten other logic wrong too

Happy weekend friends!

The lead developer’s car in the payment processor’s parking lot.

Introduction

A conversation I overheard yesterday at a local coffee shop:

– No-one: …
– Absolutely no-one: …
– Kroger: Hey I’ve got a fresh idea, how about 4x fuel points gift cards this weekend?
– Third party gift sellers: [facepalm]

In a move that could only surprise someone with advanced dementia, Kroger is indeed having another 4x fuel points sale on third party gift cards between Friday and Sunday. In case you’re keeping track, we’ve had fewer than a dozen days since June without a 4x fuel points sale, and as a result the gift card resale market is depressed, like Tony Soprano season 2 depressed.

A Rocky Year

Fuel points either partially or completely offset the loss taken from selling bulk gift cards and are therefore a huge part of the bulk gift card market toolkit. In prior years Kroger fuel points were the easiest grocery point to deal with by far. But this year, Kroger has started to throw wrenches into the works:

It looks as though Kroger isn’t happy with its fuel points program and is actively taking steps to change how it works. In the meantime, bulk buyers and bulk sellers are being cautious and volume has plummeted, presumably until the dust as settled and we have a better idea about what’s working and what’s not.

What Seems Safe?

So far I haven’t heard any reports of accounts with fewer than 20,000 fuel points being targeted, so 20,000 may be a soft capacity on accounts for the near-term future. It also seems likely that account age is part of Kroger’s silent blocking algorithm, so your long-term personal account is probably safe.

Here’s the bright-side I guess: Buying an Amazon gift card at Kroger will definitely earn you a few fuel points for your own use, and that discount beats fake discount Amazon gift cards sold directly by Amazon.

Happy selling!

Misunderstanding how Kroger fuel points work.

  1. American Express has a new phone-in-only offer of 20,000 Membership Rewards for adding an authorized user card to a personal Platinum and spending $2,000. This beats the current best online offer that I know of, which is generally 10,000 Membership Rewards for $2,000 in spend, but may be higher for specific accounts.

    To see if you’re targeted, call the number on the back of your Platinum card and say something like “Are there any offers for adding authorized user cards to my account?” because apparently we’re just supposed to know that’s a thing. (Thanks to JayJayHI2000)

  2. Southwest has a fare sale for 40% off of domestic airfare to and from many cities in California using promo code SAVE40. You have to book by this evening and travel between August 23 and February 15 of next year, and of course several holidays are blocked out. The included airports are BUR, FAT, LAX, LGB, OAK, ONT, PSP, SAN, SBA, SFO, SJC, SMF, and SNA.

    Based on discussion in the MEAB slack, eligibility on different flights varies, and some travel represents a true 40% discount, while other cities seem to have inflated fares that are cancelled out by the sale. (Thanks to Brian M)

  3. The Capital One pre-approval tool has a 100,000 miles offer on the Capital One Venture card with $10,000 spend in three months which beats the regular offer by 25,000 miles. Personally though I’d stick with the 250,000 mile Capital One Spark Travel Elite if you can find your way in through a small business banker, and that one won’t affect your 5/24 status either.

If the Spark Travel Elite is an [insert your favorite dinner here], then the Venture is this.