Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is happening now! Follow us as Greg, Nick, and Stephen compete to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines before November 23rd. Who will complete the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
TopCashBack has just increased the cash back rate for PlasticJungle. Now, you will receive 4% cash back for both purchases of gift cards and sales of gift cards! 4% might not sound like a huge number, but if your goal is to increase credit card spend without losing (much) money, this is big news. With the new rates, there should be plenty of opportunities to buy discounted gift cards, resell them, and get all of your money back!
As always, take a look at the charts on this page: Gift cards: buy low, sell high, get cash back for the latest and greatest gift card options.
Once this crazy weekend is over, I’ll spend time researching ways to leverage these new rates. In the meantime, if you find some good opportunities, please consider sharing them in the comments below.
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FMiler I’m glad you have had good interactions with topcashback but so far I’ve had several issues. I have three sales to Cardpool, all of which tracked correctly and show amounts sold but are still showing $0 cash back. It says it has be verified first when they receive my cards but I have already been paid by cardpool several weeks ago so it should be tracking now.
My three sales to giftcards.com have purchase amount $0 and $0 cash back, again I have already been paid by giftcards.com for the cards I sent them several weeks ago. I opened a claim with topcashback last week and have gotten no response after my claim and sending a nudge.
It seems you have a better relationship with them, just wanted to give a warning to anyone else to proceed with caution.
D Olsen: That’s scary. I’ll pass along this feedback.
Recently did a fair amount (approx $1.5K) of churn through PJ. Most transactions went smoothly with minimal nailbiting. One however, didn’t. The sale was “processing” for a couple of weeks. PJ said they’d never received the cards. Then I received the cards back from PJ with a cryptic note that the sale couldn’t be completed for “technical reasons.” The cards still have the same value (I checked), so I’ll just send them to Cardpool. Maybe I tripped some sort of “churning” trigger, but a later sale went through fine. It’s enough to put me off PJ a bit.
Can someone point to a link on TopCashBack for PlasticJungle? I can’t find the link.
madopi: Thanks: good words of caution
Sun: http://www.topcashback.com/plasticjungle/
I would advise everyone to do this gift card churning moderately. They’ll call you every time if you try to sell a lot, and if they find out you are gift card churning, well they might decide not to do business with you, then you are stuck with all the gift cards.
Here is more info if anyone is interested: https://squareup.com/pricing
I believe Square (squareup.com) allows you to charge credit cards and directly deposit into your bank account for a 2.75%, slightly better than Paypaling money to yourself.
Just an fyi, it appears that Plastic Jungle does not accept gc’s that were in their system before. I bought an eGC from CardPool and tried to sell it on PJ but was denied with an error saying it was recently in their system and will not be accepted.
I’m a bit confused as I totally want to get in this but why wouldn’t you just send yourself credit card money with the 3% via paypal or venmo vs. losing more than 3% with doing a gift card churn?
Have you actually been paid by TopCashBack yet? I’m now over 90 days on some transactions and they simply tell me I have to keep waiting.
Arizona Guy: Yes, several transactions have been paid including one from March 26th at PlasticJungle. 90 days seems excessive, you might want to escalate the issue.
Ryan from MA: The goal is to find ways to buy and sell without any loss or with such a small loss that the points earned from your credit card cover the loss.
oc25: Wow, that’s a risk I never thought of! Thanks for bringing it up. In rare cases you can use a gift card to buy other gift cards as a way around that issue. Walmart, for example, allows that.
Grant Thomas: It is against Square’s terms and conditions to use their service for cash advances. If they discover you doing that they’ll freeze your Square account.
[…] finally, Frequent Miler tells us that TopCashBack has raised its rebate level to 4% on gift card purchases and sales through PlasticJungl…, making it that much easier to churn gift cards for points and miles without losing too much cash […]
Good afternoon, what gift cards have the smallest buy/sell spreads?