What follows is a hypothetical perpetual money machine. While I’ve successfully tried each individual step, I’ve never put them all together as shown here. Don’t think of this as a recommendation of what you should do, but rather take it as intended: a fun way to think about what is possible…
Prepare
To get started, you need a Discover card account and a good rewards credit card. You can use a Discover card for both purposes… or not. It doesn’t really matter. You also need to be signed up for Plink. In your Plink account, put Kmart in your Plink Wallet.
Buy gift cards
Use your Discover account to access the ShopDiscover portal. There you can find Sears with a 10% cash back bonus.
Click through and buy a $50 physical Sears gift card to be mailed to your home. Pay with the credit card linked to Plink and you will earn 300 Plink points since the charge looks like it came from Kmart.
Repeat buying $50 gift cards as often as you’d like, but make each one a completely separate purchase to maximize Plink rewards. With each order, you will earn $5 in Discover Rewards and $3 worth of Plink points.
Upgrade Discover Rewards
Instead of redeeming your Discover Rewards for cash, redeem for Lands’ End e-gift cards. These are available for 20% off and work the same as Sears’ gift cards. This way, the value of your Discover Rewards grows by 25% (i.e. $40 becomes $50 in Sears’ credit).
Redeem Plink Points for Walmart gift cards
There are several options for redeeming Plink points, but for the sake of this alchemy, we’ll choose Walmart.
Upgrade Sears (and Lands’ End) gift cards to Visa
Go to Sears. Hunt down the secret gift card rack. Use Sears’ gift cards to buy $100 Visa (or MasterCard) gift cards (each with a $5.95 fee). You have now lost just under 6% of your gift card value, but you’ve turned it into a more useful element.
You could stop here, but for fun let’s keep going…
Buy eBay gift cards at the grocery store
Take those $100 Visa gift cards to a grocery store that offers fuel points. Best bet is to go to one that offers extra fuel points for gift card purchases. At Kroger, for example, they standardly offer 2 fuel points per dollar for gift card purchases and sometimes run promotions for even more. Buy eBay gift cards.
Buy Walmart gift cards
On eBay, $500 Walmart gift cards are often offered for $485 (3% off face value). Use your eBay gift cards to buy them. You will earn 2% back in the form of eBay bucks which can be used towards future purchases of Walmart gift cards.
Upgrade Walmart gift cards to Visa gift cards
Walmart gift cards can be used to buy fixed value Visa gift cards. Online, Walmart offers $200 Visa gift cards for $206.88.
Pay credit card bill
Remember that this chain started with an online purchase of Sears gift cards. So, take those $200 Visa gift cards to Walmart to load your Bluebird card. Use your Bluebird account’s Bill Pay feature to pay off your credit card.
Add it up
Start with a $10,000 investment…
- Buy $10K worth of Sears gift cards, earn $1K Discover Cash and $300 in Plink points.
- Redeem $1K Discover Cash for 25 $50 Lands’ End gift cards (they cost $40 each). You now have $1250 in Lands’ end gift cards and $10K in Sears’ gift cards for a total of $11,250.
- Go to Sears and use $11,230.70 in Sears’ gift cards to buy 106 $100 Visa gift cards (yeah, this will take a while!).
- Redeem $300 in Plink points for $300 in Walmart gift cards.
- Go to Kroger (for example) and use those 106 Visa gift cards to buy $10,600 worth of eBay gift cards. Earn 21,200 fuel points.
- On eBay, buy 21 $500 Walmart gift cards for $10,185. Earn $203.70 in eBay Bucks.
- You now have $10,500 in Walmart gift cards from eBay and $300 from Plink. Use those gift cards to buy 52 $200 Visa gift cards. You now have $10,400 in Visa gift cards
- Use $10,000 worth of Visa gift cards to payoff the original $10K investment.
Here’s what you have left:
- Two $200 Visa gift cards = $400
- Sears gift card value: $19.30
- eBay gift card value: $415
- eBay Bucks: $203.70
- Walmart gift card value: $42.24
Total profit: $1080.24! Plus, don’t forget those 21,200 fuel points (you will need them for all those trips to Sears, Kroger, and Walmart!). And, of course, you would earn rewards from your credit card for $10K worth of spend.
Discussion
The gift card alchemy shown above is theoretically possible, but it is far from realistic. There are many problems that would crop up in the real world. For example, here are a few:
- ShopDiscover cash back might not post correctly.
- Sears’ fraud department will most likely get concerned when you place so many individual $50 gift card orders!
- Sears is unlikely to have 106 $100 Visa gift cards!
- Even if you could buy over $10K worth of eBay gift cards at a grocery store, they typically come in $25 denominations. Do you really want to rub off all those silver strips and key in all those numbers? I didn’t think so.
- While $500 Walmart gift cards are regularly offered on eBay for $485, they typically do not ship them for several months. Plus, you’re unlikely to find 21 of them!
- At any time, Walmart might stop allowing the use of their gift cards to buy Visa gift cards.
- The ability to use Visa gift cards to load Bluebird accounts may come to an end at any time.
I picked a $10K starting point just as a fun way of showing big profits. In real life, the only way someone could make this work is to do it in much smaller numbers. However, with smaller numbers come smaller profits. Is it worth all of that running around and absorbing all those risks for $100? $50? For most people, probably not. Still, its fun to think of what is possible…
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[…] “Easy” and “Frequent Miler” don’t tend to go together in the same sentence. I tend to gravitate to the complicated stuff. After all, why write about a simple deal that takes two sentences to explain when I can, instead, write about a complex 8 part scheme that requires a lot of risk and effort for moderate rewards and will most likely no longer work a week later (like this one)? […]
Discover can claw back reward points if you don’t use the their card. I am now sitting with minus $160 in my account because I had already redeemed the points, so they put me in the hole when they did a manual review and “Discovered” I didn’t use their card.
I was just going to let the card die, but decided I can get the money back with a couple of $75 Disc bonus qtrs, VR at gas station and then online via AP. So that will get me back to even and can go back to using ShopDiscover, but only when using the DC if I want to be sure. I had received tons of ShopDisc earlier without using card so I am not saying this happens every time.
Can I please hire someone to do all this for me? Yes, I am fat and lazy. I only have enough energy to READ about doing this, and that supply is nearly exhausted
Ken: Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any way to earn Plink rewards when paying with HIGC
Alchemy certainly looks like hard work, but I thought it was worth a try to consume 1 or 2 Discover HIGC’s loaded with $500 each that I have “left over” in my wallet… from you know what (over recent weeks.)
But I found I was unable to register a HIGC with Plink site as it asks for a password to a banking website where I “manage” this card. Since you don’t “manage” a HIGC, how can I register it with Plink?
If you can help me with this—it’s watch out local Sears stores – I’m heading over to raid your GC rack!
I think eBay is the weakest link in this chain. To find all those Walmart gift cards is going to be challenging. But it does give ideas for people who want to think outside of the box, which is the point of the discussion – to teach you how to fish rather than giving you fish.
Marc,
When you say “no one has mentioned..”
“My real concern though is the risk aspect that occurs at each stage that is disproportionate to profit. For example: it only takes one of those $500 eBay cards to be fraudulent to…”
🙂
now must enter that AMEX has Superior Service via Captca, and I kinda start to believe it is true with each comment I make!
Marc, I agree with your caution. I’d say 50% of all my WMT GC purchases ended up as a scam of some sort and I bought a lot of cards. Maybe 25k-30k in a 2 month period. You are protected by Ebay Buyers Protection but its a huge hassle. I was buying them when you got credit for EBay purchases thru MyPoints and then turn them into United Miles.
Phil, I buy at Kroger all the time and they absolutely give fuel pts for varaiable GC purchases. As always YMMV but Ive been to Krogers at multiple states and all have earned fuel pts.
No one has mentioned that there are large denomination of gift cards on ebay (like walmart), that are purchased with stolen credit cards. So by the time you get the card, the fraud department of the stolen credit card has reversed the charge, and the merchant has cancelled the credit card. Additionally, any card that takes weeks and weeks to get is most likely one of these.
And yes, I speak from experience. Just be careful buying those big cards!
My KMart did indeed take Sears gift cards in payment for BP gift cards. The cashier swiped them on her register. And my local Kroger gave me fuel points on a $500 variable load visa gift card. So the moral is again- your experience may vary.
Greg
This might be great for someone who has nothing to do, but…………..why not go to CVS for VRs and load to BB
Seems lots easier to me
I do suspect there is some tongue in cheek here, right ??
There is a $5000/6 month rolling period for ebay gift card purchases. Also, if you are unlucky and haven’t made a lot of purchases with ebay gift cards, they may freeze your account until you can prove that you made the ebay gift card purchase legitmately. That is you used your credit card to purchase the ebay gift card. They did it to me and my wife’s account when I discovered this trick and purchased a lot of $500 walmart gift cards on ebay. I had to upload a lot of documents along with my reciept for the ebay gift cards from Frys, along with my credit card statement to show the credit card I bought the gift cards belonged to me. They wouldn’t unfreeze my account at first because they thought I used an AMEX prepaid gift card. I had to explain that it was my AMEX blue preferred credit card. They wouldn’t have unfrozen it otherwise, or given me my money for the unused ebay gift card. They haven’t asked me for any reciepts though after the first initial freezing that they did to both my account and my wife’s account. Just a little warning that if you don’t use ebay gift cards regularly, and you make some big purchases with ebay gift cards they may ask you to prove that you bought the gift cards through legal means, and paying with a prepaid gift card won’t satisify them, you will have to link that prepaid card to the kmart reciepts, to the gift cards, that will have to be shown to have been bought with your credit card…Just a little heads up because I did do this for awhile minus the kmart gift cards. Does anyone know of a cashback portal that will give cashback on visa gift cards from walmart purchased with a walmart gift card? This can add some more profit to the above strategy if there is a portal. Thanks!
I’ve bought a lot of Visa GC at Kroger & they do NOT give you fuel points.
Kroger details their policy about fuel points for gift cards here: http://www.kroger.com/fuel/pages/a1.aspx
Specifically, they say:
Great read, even if real world execution would be virtually impossible. I enjoy your outside-the-box thinking FM, it is head and shoulders above your competition.
To the readers complaining about the CAPTCHA… find something worthwhile to complain about. People in the world wake up wondering if they’re going to eat and you have an issue because the blog you read to find tricks to earn virtuallyvFREE premium travel made you type in some advertisement? I assume you read FM because you enjoy the content. Why not help the guy make a buck?