Simon Mall has increased the amount of gift cards a consumer can purchase in a single day to $25,000, up from $10,000 (including purchase fees). This includes Visa, Mastercard & American Express gift cards all of which can be purchased in denominations up to $500 for a $3.95 purchase fee. Interestingly enough this change was directly communicated with Frequent Miler so it seems like they are OK with high levels of manufactured spend.
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Posters on the FT Simon thread suggesting that all AMEX no longer giving any points/miles/MR’s for Simon spend. Worrying if true. Anyone here have any DP’s?
any folks with amex biz plat got acct shut down or frozen with a $5k purchase at simon?
Does Amex get Level 3 data on Simon Mall gc purchases?
It would purportedly say Simon on the receipt. I’m pretty sure they would be aware that Simon sells gifts, just by their name… no level 3 data necessary.
“So it seems like they are OK with high levels of manufactured spend.” They have been more than ok with ms for a long time. Their friendly attitude, combined with the low price of GCs, make them my hands-down favorite gc vendor.
Does anyone know what is highest return credit card at Simon mall?
Do any cards get category bonuses from SM online?
They can increase it up to $100K per day but it won’t excite me since buying is easy but liquidating them has been very challenging since late 2018. With unstable liquidation methods these days, I’d rather not be caught stucked with several thousands GCs.
Now….if they’d sell non corporate $1K GCs with slightly higher fees, that’ll get me excited.
What is a non-corporate GC?
You can set up a corporate account with Simon and order $1K GCs BUT these cannot be used for MS purposes, i.e., you can’t buy and drain them in one transaction or they will shut down your corporate account.
The ones discussed here is for consumers VGC where the max load on one card is $500. With more and more stores disallowing split payments, $1k VGC would’ve been very ideal with just one swipe but I know it’s wishful thinking.
“With more and more stores disallowing split payments”
Do tell, I haven’t heard about this, which stores?
It’s always been YMMV depending on your location, i.e. whether at grocery stores like Kroger or WM, there are cashiers who disallow split payments with MO. In a lot of cases where cashiers ask to see the card and reject VGCs, having $1K VGC will be so useful in buying MOs up to $1K with most cashiers not getting suspicious that it’s a GC when buyer is not asking to split payments. I know many MSers just do one swipe these days and that increases liquidation fees.
Oh, just for MOs specifically, OK. I haven’t pursued the MO route myself, and haven’t run into issues with split payments on normal purchases.
I’d be nervous about doing that regularly – anything over an aggregate of 10k daily and they should be required to fill out a SAR with FinCEN under the Bank Secrecy Act.
This assumes that all the cash is being liquidated into the same account.
The SAR only applies to cash, and I think the bigger thing about this (at least for me) is it means fewer trips to do the same amount of MS.
Exactly! I’ve had times when I needed to MS 14k and had to make two trips because of the 10k Limit. I doubt most people who regularly MS 10k will even consider doing above 20k, maybe 12-15 but not 20+. That’s for the whales.
imagine if there was an ability to fee-free use ATMs to liquidate Visa gift cards…. or even better to just be able to deposit them like you would a regular check to your bank without having to convert to money order… I’d be about that on a daily basis!!!
I had a dream that the new Chase mobile App would allow this. Just take a picture of the front and back of the gift card and it deposits to your checking account! Simple!
A person can build a 5M/yr “business” by buying Simon Mall VGC’s . Quite the country we live in eh.
It’s more funny that you could actually make decent living simply by spending 8h each day doing the MS on a single 25k purchase each work day. Netting nearly six figures in profit.
What could go wrong? LOL!
Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong, LOL!!
Haha. customer service matters in this “business” and the customer you serve is yourself. LOL!!
How? I’ve only used it (in the past) to meet the spend on certain cards but never could imagine how one could generate a six-figure profit of income. My interest is piqued!!!
Okay well for starters have a 2% Card or two to split spend.
2% on a 25k Purchase is $500
Of that you pay $197.50 in GC fees and another $22 in MO fees.
Leaving you with $280.50 in profit.
If you earned that profit every single day of the year you’d get:
$102,382
Take 8 days off a year for birthday and holidays and you’d still be over 100k.
Personally it would take me 4 days to liquidate the 25k so if I did this method it would take 4 years to get 100k with WM new limits in place I don’t know how someone could do more. I wish I had more methods of liquidating lol
Important point you’ve forgotten: credit card rewards/cashback are not taxable income (considered a refund by the IRS). So that $102,382 is untaxed.. which is more like $150k/yr of a normal taxable salary.
Buying gcs is easy. Liquidation is increasingly difficult
THIS. I know some people live in a MS-friendly area (low MS population or other factors) and these are probably the ones saying ‘easy peasy’. But, I think most major metro areas you will have difficulty liquidating without having to waste time finding the ‘MS-friendly’ CSRs at the WM Money Center or whatever grocery store allowing debit for MO. Though if you make the effort to find multiple liquidation methods besides those two, kudos for making the effort to do that and more power to you.
Cannot agree more
I can’t find one Wal-Mart in ny that lets me buy money orders.i just dont know any place that does it anymore..
when i shop. if a see a guy paying cash ..i try talking him into letting me pay with gift card and him giving me the cash.
A majority of mine allow 1k (2 swipes max) per day. If I drove to 6 of them plus the 1 that allows 2k that’d be like 100 Miles in Driving.
One liquidation method I will let you guys know (but warn definitely to tread very lightly) is you can use VGC to make payments towards store issued CC’s. Any Store issued CC that allows payment via Debit Card you can use this method. You can overpay the card and call to request a credit balance refund check. Definitely wouldn’t try to exceed $1,000-$1,500 though as it’ll easily get your CC shutdown. But if you live in an area where liquidation is difficult and need to liquidate a couple thousand and have a few store cards that accept debit payment in store this method works.