Update 7/28/20: Giftcards.com has now lowered their max to $250 as well. Simon Mall $1,000 gift cards are the only online high-denom Visa/MC gift card available that comes to mind now. (Hat tip to GC Galore)
Original Post 7/3/20:
Giftcardmall has reduced the maximum value of their Visa gift cards to $250, down from $500. Some speculate this is due to fraud issues, perhaps it’ll back eventually. Giftcards.com is still selling $500 Visa gift cards.
Giftcardmall and giftcards.com also decreased their portal rewards max from $60,000 in purchases to $2,000. Lots of changes on the manufactured spend front.
Hat tip to eric and dabigman9748
Little sense in buying other than to secure a Cartera portal bonus (gotta be at least 4x to be worth it)
Good. I now have the final straw I was looking for to stop buying from both of them. MS becomes an obsession that I don’t really need to be doing anyway. I’ll just do MS light now and be happier (I think).
I stick with high cash back MS. I don’t get out of bed unless it’s at least 5%.
You must be very well rested so far this year, I envy you.
I wish. Been reading about things that don’t even pertain to me. Information overload.
I hear ya. With Covid causing all the good eateries around here to close up or move to take out only I’ve spent more time watching YouTube trying to find creative ideas for cooking at home. If there is one thing Covid has allowed me to do is realize how much time I waste reading about credit cards and MS.
I hardly ever fly internationally, have more than enough points to fly domestic many, many times over, so I’m okay with putting my time and effort into something else.
Found out through this all that my wife is actually an interesting person when I take the time to actually listen to her when she speaks rather than sticking my head into a computer screen or an excel worksheet.. Hahahaha!
there’s always SUB and checking accounts. high yield, low effort.
and if you look closely there’s other opportunities around too.
@Fathiss, there’s something to be said for simplicity. I understand your perspective. I used to hit it hard but after a while it just becomes another chore. While I won’t pass up a really good earning possibility I’m not longer going out of my way to do it. Hence the reason I closed my Amex Gold.
I know if I have the card I would be obligated to hit gift cards at the grocery store like crazy. Now that I don’t have it, one less thing to worry about.
Wow. Just placed two orders at gc last night.
This is targeted at MS’ers for sure. Money launderers and fraudsters don’t care, they will just buy twice as many cards now. If they cared about Fraud, there are more effective ways to go about it, than lowering the load limit. Instead, they’ve just doubled the purchase fee, and effectively increased the cost of a MO transaction.
A lot of the fraud is coming from bogus visa websites. People go to the wrong website to register/set PIN. Come to find out their cards are drained. They end up reporting their $500 cards stolen and the cards are reissued. Visa could go after these criminals but instead they take this route.
That makes a lot of sense. These scammers will do anything…
It would be nice if GC and gcm would lower that purchase fee though…They have so much volume that surely they can qualify for massively discounted interchange with the processing companies.
As is, the people who want $500 still need to buy 2 $250 cards so in theory they might still have the same sales volume…but of course I think they’ll lose the MS crowd now. So even less incentive to drop these fees.
if someone is buying their product why would they lower their fees? When MS was going strong there would be zero incentive for them to drop their fees (irrespective of if they got a cheaper rate from the processing companies)
because lower fees drives more sales. The rate at which the interchange fees drop is different from the rate at which they can lower the fees. So there’s still profit.
what does giftcards.com code as?
They killed the zombie. Is it 100% dead now?
Great, just when I was to place my order for the upromise promo, I guess it’s my fault for waiting this long
Sad to see. On another note, my most recent GC.com order of $2485 (or something like that) garnered me $24.85 in cash back from Rakuten, so maybe the $2k/mo isn’t a hard limit, or maybe they’ll take part of it back before payout.
Good thing I got my order in for the Upromise promo before this occurred.
They did this before a couple years ago and then went back to $500. Hopefully this is the case again.
what was the reason for the decrease back then, if you remember?
How long between those two events?