Just wanted to quickly round up a few recently dead deals with a bit of added commentary. It’s good to know about dead deals so you don’t waste time or money on them, and so you know what kinds of things to keep an eye out for.
- Gamestop – Amazon conversion. Upgrading gift cards at Gamestop has been going on like forever. The biggest angle was to use Gamestop gift cards to buy Amazon gift cards. Then when Amazon Cash added Gamestop as a reload location there was an unlimited angle there. Apparently, the Gamestop gods caught wind of this and now they’ve sent out a memo and even hard-coded against it according to this Milesperday post.
- Giftcardmart 5x. They used to earn 5x when paying with an INK Cash/Plus card and 3x when paying with an INK Preferred card. Many readers reached out to let us know that it’s no longer working. The category switched over from being ‘Utilities’ to being ‘Miscellaneous’ causing it to stop earning the bonus points. Presumably, INK Preferred won’t earn 3x either. This has happened in the past and they were able to get it back, here’s hoping…
- Alliant – giftcards.com purchases. The Alliant card earns 3% cash back in its first year and 2.5% afterward making it a preferred cashback card for manufactured spend. Sadly, beginning a few weeks ago they stopped paying out anything for giftcards.com purchases, not even 1%. They’ve also sent out a letter to those who used this heavily that they are not using the card as intended and if they continue doing might get shut down. Apparently Giftcardmall is also not earning anymore, and maybe even Simon Mall purchases. Means we’ll have to keep an eye out for any other websites or stores that can potentially be excluded. (Hat tip again to Milesperday.)
- MPX – 5x Platinum. The MPX app is an excellent way to rack up some bonus United miles for buying gift cards to many places including top retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy. It used to code as a United flight and earn 5x Membership Rewards points with the Amex Platinum as airfare. That ended around February 11th. Good chance that the 3x with PRG died too. We wrote about this one in a dedicated post.
I was thinking of applying for this card but read this in the disclosure:
“Cash back is not eligible on … purchases of and any fees paid towards gift cards, pre-paid cards, re-loadable cards ….”
I buy gift cards on sale all the time because they can be a good value, but no cash back now at all for gift cards if using this card.
On Alliant, is it just the heavy hitters that aren’t getting the 3% anymore for gcm and gc.com or is everyone excluded now? Seems like if it was everyone, Alliant should have notified all cardholders, or at least those who had made at least one purchase from gcm/gc.com.
I fully agree. I would have expected to get a notification from Alliant, but there isn’t one.
I did make a purchase from Gift Card Mall for ~ $1K on 4/3 and only thanks to this site I now notice that apparently there was 0% cashback awarded for this purchase. Alliant is not very transparent with the cashback calculations. It is not showing the cashback for individual purchases, only the total for the statement. I am short exactly the amount of purchase + maybe a few cents (they seem to round up the cash back to a whole dollar).
So, I guess everyone is affected. Period.
Not unexpected, if a lot of people were getting greedy and hitting it hard.
Started cracking up at that DEAD image, was a bit unexpected for some reason
nobody should be surprised. this is what happens when you have at least 100k pple in the game. SMH…
hehe I wish there was 100K people….I think thats a fraction of the people in the game now
This hurts every part of me…especially MPX :'(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jz1TjCphXE
Peculiar. Mastercard Ink purchases are still earning 5% with gift card mart
This post is the blog equivalent of Debbie Downer.