I had previously reported (here and here) that it was possible to earn portal cash back when reloading Sears gift cards. A number of readers have since reported that, as of December 12th or so, cash back portals have begun tracking these reloads at $0. In other words, it looks like you won’t get any cash back via portals.
At this point I think its necessary to redo all of the previous Sears portal experiments. We’ll report our success or failure through the Frequent MIler Laboratory. If you’d like to stay up to date with Lab experiments, subscribe to that page by viewing the Lab page and adding a comment and checking the box to “Notify me of follow-up comments by email.”