{"id":5819,"date":"2022-11-22T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-22T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/?p=5819"},"modified":"2023-04-18T11:14:48","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T17:14:48","slug":"masking-charges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2022\/11\/22\/masking-charges\/","title":{"rendered":"Masking Charges"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you were a programmer at a bank and you had to code a bonus category for a particular vendor, say like earning 32x Membership Rewards points on flights to Mars booked through Deep Discount Mars Trips, how would you do it? You\u2019ve got a few decent options for how you might award a bonus based on:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A particular merchant account and payment processor<\/li>\n<li>A particular merchant category code (MCC)<\/li>\n<li>A specific merchant name, like \u201cDEEP DISCOUNT MARS TRIPS LLC\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of course you don\u2019t have to pick just one of those, good banks and good programmers will do two or all three. Of course, there are some FinTechs out there that take the easy way out and do the bare minimum, for example, searching for \u201cMARS\u201d in a charge\u2019s name and awarding 32x if the letters are found in the charge description. When that happens you\u2019ll earn 32x at:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Marsha\u2019s Grab and Go<\/li>\n<li>Cactus and Marshes LLC<\/li>\n<li>The Marshmallow and Vacuum Emporium<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Often the FinTech programmer figures out that they\u2019ve made a mistake and will fix the bonus award by implementing a blocklist instead of fixing it the right way, so the logic is: Award 32x if \u201cmars\u201d is in the charge description, but not if the description is \u201cThe Marshmallow and Vacuum Emporium\u201d. Because of course they do.<\/p>\n<p>Well, in the cat-and-mouse game with FinTechs, there are often ways to name-mangle your merchant description to side-skirt blocklists, for example by paying with a service like PayPal which will prepend PAYPAL MARK* to the front of your charge description, leading to 32x again.<\/p>\n<p>It should probably go without saying, but let\u2019s say it anyway: bonus street cred if you use one FinTech product to mask the charge for another FinTech. Happy hunting!<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-image is-style-editorskit-rounded\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><img alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5820\" decoding=\"async\" sizes=\"(max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px\" src=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/marshmallows.jpeg\" srcset=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/marshmallows.jpeg 512w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/marshmallows-300x300.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/marshmallows-150x150.jpeg 150w\" width=\"420\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:14px\">The Marshmallow and Vacuum Emporium, ripe for earning 32x.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you were a programmer at a bank and you had to code a bonus category for a particular vendor, say like earning 32x Membership<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":1,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[62,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shenanigans","category-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5819"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6897,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5819\/revisions\/6897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}