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You know what they say, fool me once…..
An awesome Amex Offer for $99 back on $99 at The Motley Fool came out earlier this week. Stephen wrote all about stacking it with shopping portals and card-linked offers, but then The Motley Fool reached out to us directly to essentially say that they were aware of what was going on and were shutting down stacking opportunities (read more here). They had told us that shopping portals would be removing offers for The Motley Fool and/or updating their terms.
I was then quite surprised when a reader reported yesterday that the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal is now offering 15,000 Ultimate Rewards points for a subscription to The Motley Fool and then in the early hours of 1/30 I found that American Airlines is paying out 14,900 AAdvantage miles, Alaska is paying 10,900 Mileage Plan miles, and United is offering 7,800 United Mileage Plus miles.
However, here’s the dirty part: while all of those portals still included a direct link to the $99 email subscription deal when the payouts increased overnight, the portal terms were updated to state that the payout is only valid on every other type of subscription The Motley Fool sells except the $99 one. You would absolutely need to be a blog reader to know that the $99 subscription isn’t going to pay out and I think the advertising here is deliberately and shamefully misleading, but I thought it was worth reporting before any readers make the mistake of going through a portal.
Here are the terms from the American Airlines AAdvantage eShopping portal as an example (bold is mine for emphasis):
Please note these terms & conditions: Eligible on one (1) subscription per loyalty account number. Only eligible on paid 1 year subscription to Discovery: Everlasting Portfolio, Motley Fool Options, and Extreme Opportunities: Augmented Reality and Beyond. Monthly subscriptions are ineligible. Offers cannot be combined/stacked with any other offer. Subscription must be active for at least 60 days. Not eligible on any free products, trials, services, memberships, subscriptions and retailer marketing subscriptions. Not eligible on purchases made with coupon or discount codes that are not found on this site. Not eligible on gift cards, gift certificates or any other similar cash equivalents. Purchases made with a gift card may be ineligible.
Who in their right mind would ever know that the payout isn’t valid on Motley Fool Stock Advisor? I especially wonder about that for anyone who was shopping late last night and saw this:
As you can see, last night the Ultimate Rewards portal (and also the American Airlines, Alaska, and United portals) had a direct link to the $99 Motley Fool Stock Advisor subscription. One would have reasonably expected to earn miles / points on that, but I think they would likely hide behind terms that didn’t include that subscription.
Now the links to the $99 subscription have been removed, but that subscription isn’t clearly excluded — it is excluded by omission rather than doing it in a clear way. And that’s why I wanted to post this warning to readers so they don’t see the increased payouts today and decide that it’s worth paying for a subscription. Indeed, last night I nearly bought a subscription for $99 with my Chase card figuring that I’d gladly pay $99 for points I could cash out for $225 worth of groceries. Luckily, the terms caught my eye. Sneaky.
So don’t get Fooled by big portal payouts. I fully expect those of us who did the deal when Stephen first posted it will see our portal payouts (I do see the 7400 American Airlines miles “posted” in my AA shopping login, though they of course have not yet been transmitted to American Airlines). But moving forward, avoid this one.
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I’ve used the Motley Fool discussion boards (free ones) for many, many years. And there are a lot of good people with good investing, tax, etc. advice on them.
But.
TMF has always been an advertising machine with misleading ads and too many premium subscriptions to mention. During market booms (like recently) all of their “advice” and stock selections looks good but when things go south, they kill off many of the subscriptions to hide the poor results.
What you reported above doesn’t surprise me.
I think I once had a subscription at least 15 years ago but let it expire. Most of their services recommend 2 stocks every month but never recommend when to sell a stock. I think that way anytime they have a winner they can claim it has gone up X% and ignore the losers.
I completed the sign up right away for the $99 plan and just got my miles posted on AA, 7400. Maybe I got lucky or was the early bird to get the worm?
I ordered through Hoopla Doopla. It has now tracked at $85 cash back! $75 (After $10 taxes) money maker after Amex offer.
No GO for this one! Thank you for the updates!
So, are you saying if we go for the $149 subscription we could then get both promotions? It would still be worth it albeit not as good of a deal if we could do the $99.
In the worst-case scenario we get a free subscription – just no profit except the regular points. So, if we find usefulness in the product it’s still a good thing. If we were doing it strictly as profit-maker then almost wasted effort.
No, definitely not saying that. Read the part in bold in the terms. It now says it is only available on those three types of accounts. The cheapest of those is $999 (the other two are $1999 or $2999). Actually, after you click through, the $999 one drops to $899 and the $1999 drops to $1399. Don’t ask me what the three grand one drops to because I stopped clicking around.
But yes, if you find the product worth something and you get $99 back on $99, then sure it is a win for you — but no portal rewards.
I had seen the Motley Rules Breakers, as opposed to the Motley Fool Advisor for a price of $149 a while back (regularly $299), but I now see they’ve dropped the price to $99 (thereby definitely making it not eligible).
Do you know when the terms changed?
At some point yesterday I think. As of a little past 2:00 a.m. eastern time this morning, the portals still showed a button link to the $99 subscription, but at some point yesterday the terms got updated to say which types of subscriptions it worked on. The misleading part was that they continued to have that button to the $99 subscription even after the terms said the payout only applied to those three specific expensive subscriptions. In fairness (sort of?), The motley fool had reached out to us yesterday to say the stack would no longer work and we did update that previous post shortly after hearing from them yesterday morning.
Fool me once, shame on me !
Charlatans. They were founded on a fraudulent stock picking method. They have nothing else to offer. Hopefully lots of chargebacks they get to deal with.
Thanks for the valuable and timely advice. I saw the higher payouts this morning and was planning to stack the offers. Thankfully I checked FM first.
It’s difficult to [even find how to] cancel Motley Fool when you tire of their constant barrage of offers and weakling stock touts aimed at subscribers. Prepare to feel trapped and harassed if you accept one of their subscriptions.
“I PITY THE (MOTLEY)FOOL!”
I feel bad about this. I posted a screenshot of my pending 7400 AA miles on “insiders” and there were a lot of people asking me about this. It seems likely some of them might have gone ahead and made a Motley Fool purchase through the portal even though I tried to explain that there would be no double dipping with the AMEX offer per the new terms and conditions. This really stinks and I can’t help but think that someone at Motley Fool created this confusion on purpose, perhaps avenging themselves for the earlier error of making an offer “too good to be true”.
Just an FYI, if you start the signup process but don’t commit, you will be inundated with discount offers. $99 for a 2 year signup, use the Amex offer for $99 back
@M P: I just tried that. I didn’t see any offers when I tried to back out of it. Note that the cheapest qualifying option now according to the terms is $999 ($899 when you click through to sign up). The others are $1999 / $2999.
I started to sign up few days ago, then backed out. Got a ton of “last chance emails”. One was $99 for 2 years, or free with Amex Aspire offer i had
Thanks for saving us on this Nick. IMO, Motley Fool is mostly a high risk/reward fools game. Many of their recommendations flame out in a 90% loss. Sure, overall they claim to beat the market, but if they hadn’t called buying Amazon back in 2002 or Netflix back in 2004 (among the hundreds of stocks they’ve recommended), their claims would be very different. I’m not saying they’re not worth it, but anyone who takes their advice really shouldn’t pick and choose stocks from their list. Doing that makes a risky game even riskier. You need to be willing to commit equally to all their recommendations and be comfortable that a significant number of them will lose the majority of what you invest. Easy to do in hindsight, but hard to do in the moment as you watch your cash disappear.
When I used these offers early yesterday morning on Alaska and AA both portals still showed the lower mileage payout (5400 and 7400 miles). Received confirmation from AA that it was tracking. Both portals show the store visit and AA shows the $99 spend but does not show miles pending. I know I shopped before they changed the terms but I don’t think I am getting the miles. Crappy way to do business.
I shopped through the Chase UR portal on the 27th and just received an email today (evening of the 31st) that confirmed getting the points (7500). Along with the 100 MR points for the purchase, I’m quite happy, but boy, they sure do send a lot of emails 🙂