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Simon Malls are in the midst of a promo enabling Manufactured Spenders to purchase Visa Gift Cards with a load value of up to $1,000 for an activation fee of just $3.95 (don’t forget to also see Mistakes to avoid on $1K Simon Visa Gift Cards). These are great for MS since higher-value cards reduce liquidation time / swipes, make it easier to pay taxes, etc. While Simon Malls have traditionally allowed individual customers to purchase up to $10,000 per day in Visa Gift Cards, earlier this year they increased that limit to $25,000 per day in Visa Gift Cards for those who have established a pattern of large purchases at a local mall. In an effort to protect personal information, Simon has recently instituted a new procedure for those who buy more than $10K per day in gift cards. You’ll still need to establish a pattern first in order to be approved to make those larger purchases, but then the order form you fill out in the future will become much simpler and require less of your information on paper.
The MEVS Loyalty Database
First of all, for those who are not yet green-lighted to buy more than $10K at once, see this previous post.
For those who can purchase more than $10K at once, here are the details of the new procedure:
- The mall will take your traditional order form one time and enter your personal information into the MEVS database system
- You will be required to supply your name, date of birth, social security number, and email address that first time
- Your information will be stored in the MEVS system and masked, then malls have been given the direction to shred your order form
- For future transactions, you will need to provide your email address and mark whether or not your personal information has changed
Again, this only applies to those purchasing $10K or more. Those who purchase less than $10K will still fill out the traditional order form. However, those purchasing over $10K in a transaction will have their personal information loaded in the MEVS database and then fill out this much-abbreviated form for future purchases:
This new process should make the process both faster and more secure since it’s one less piece of paper sitting around with all of your personal information. While some may still be uncomfortable with providing information like social security number at all, it is a requirement to make large purchases at Simon Malls. I’d rather have it encrypted on a computer than sitting in a folder on a piece of paper in the office, but that’s just me.
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Can anyone mention what banking accounts are best and worst for depositing Money orders bought with simon cards?
Small local banks / CUs. Do not deposit in a bank where you have CCs that you care about losing. You don’t want Chase to decide they’d prefer not to do business with you. If Regional Bank of the Timber Pines decides they’d rather not have your business, life will move on.
Just a note of interest. I have been buying the gift cards online since about February or March. Last week up until today (Thursday, July 25), every time I tried to make a purchase I would get an error code (500.0) & the transaction would not go through. I repeatedly tried to make a purchase with no success. I contacted Blackhawk Network in Reno, NV who responds to the online orders & they gave me tips that should have resolved the problem which they thought was with my computer. Last night I looked up the error code which indicated the problem was with the Blackhawk Network server. Well, they must have fixed the problem since I was able to make an online purchase today.
[…] Simon says: New (improved) procedure for $10K+ purchases by Frequent Miler. Good to see Simon streamline these purchases. […]
What is “the MEVS Database” and who has access to the data in it?
Why worry aout the MEVS database security before checking on https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/ to see whether Equiax has already leaked all your cofidential data?
As long as Simon sells 1k cards it’s worth it to me to buy at the mall.
The 500’s are better online with cash back and offers.
Which portal gives back for Simon mall purchases. I haven’t found any.
Not to be ‘that guy’, but Ariana posted this like 10 days ago… She’s been all over this opportunity from the beginning. Just sayin
Yeah, she received the same information we did. I wasn’t sure that this form was necessarily worth reporting as those spending north of $10K would find out about it anyway. Greg decided he thought it was worth letting people know about it and reminded folks who may have forgotten about the $1K cards being available, so we posted it tonight.
I’m glad you already knew about it. That’s great for you. Surely not everyone reads every post at every blog every day, so sometimes we cover things whether or not they’ve been covered elsewhere in order to make sure that our readers don’t miss it. If Point Chaser had been where I’d heard about it, I’d have certainly hat tipped her. But Ariana would surely also tell you that she was copied on the same email we were, so we heard about it from the same source.
Understandable, was reading the post & thought I’d already read this somewhere else before… Honestly not trying to be a d, sorry if it came across that way. I read FM everyday & have learned a lot from you guys.
100% came across that way.