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0 pointsKirby643y ago0 comments

Around the time that tap-to-pay apps were in their infancy, vendors were offering extremely generous bonuses... a combination of a couple of these ended with essentially free snacks for the entire time this promo existed (~6 month period).

This was back when the tap-to-pay app was called ISIS, for context.

I combined a couple offers:

Amex's Serve (prepay debit card thing) offered a $1 off any transaction over $1 (a fixed $1, not a percentage), up to 50 transactions a month.

The vending machine company near me that had machines in my office offered a buy-4-get-1-free promo using tap-to-pay that has a very weird implementation: The dollar limit for the buy-4 portion had no lower limit, and the get-1 had a fixed $4 worth of payout.

Essentially, every time I got up and went to the bathroom I'd stop by a vending machine, buy 4 items worth $1.25 (costing me, $1 total), and then use the get-1 portion to buy $4 worth of items.

I'd then turn around and sell said $1.25 items to folks in my department for well under ($0.75 for $1.25 items, etc). I told them exactly what I was doing, nobody wanted to deal with the hassle though. And the dollar amounts were so small. The real reason I sold them to coworkers was because I wanted quarters for the pool table at a nearby bar.

In addition to those two offers, the Amex Serve also just straight up gave you something like $60 for signing up for the account plus adding some small amount of money to the card. This basically funded this series of $0.25 purchases for the entire 6 months.

I basically got unlimited snacks for myself, and a freeish source of quarters to fund my pool games for that time period.

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shitlord3y ago

People have gotten millions of airline rewards miles through credit card churning. They don't even try to conceal what they're doing. For a while, people were purchasing thousands of dollars in coinage from the government, using their credit cards. Another method which still works is purchasing gift cards and using them to purchase money orders which can be deposited into a bank account.

These credit card offers are designed to exploit people who have difficulty living within their means. It's interesting how creative people are in exploiting the loopholes left behind.

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