Emphasis mine.
We get it. You don’t like spoon feeding. You think everyone should go reinvent the wheel and try things out for themselves. You’re less risk averse than others. Seriously, we get it.
Sorry, really not trying to be a jerk, but you’ve repeated this point over and over and it’s getting old. It’s adding unnecessary commentary to an otherwise pretty decent discussion.
[quote=“jaytrader, post:225, topic:649”]
Sorry, really not trying to be a jerk, but you’ve repeated this point over and over and it’s getting old. It’s adding unnecessary commentary to an otherwise pretty decent discussion.
[/quote]You just proved my point : )
What point was that? I honestly must have missed it. I was simply stating that we don’t need to continue expressing our feelings on circles and arrows vs pounding the pavement given how subjective that is.
Edit: PMed you so we can take this offline and not clog up the thread.
I know your frustration was directed to Ma_Barker, but since I also have an aversion to spoon-feeding:
I think a big part of it stems from it only encouraging more beginner-level questions being asked in the future and it significantly helps the vast number of lurkers wondering the same thing. If you leave a bowl of milk outside your front door for that cute stray kitten out there don’t be surprised if the next day you find an army of cats out there waiting for more milk! I guess in this analogy @anon13208070 is the cute kitten that we’re very tempted to help out. 
So if we start answering such basic questions here in a few days we’ll be overrun by a dozen more equally-painful questions. Also, most of us aren’t a big fan of such things being openly discussed and really don’t want to invite more new members to join in our hobby with us.
It would be one thing if TripleB had PM’d someone like @Venturion (I only pick on him since back on FWF he had garnered a bit of a reputation for being a MSer) and said something like:
I heard from a friend that you do more MSing before 10AM than most people do all day. Can you help me get started with MSing at my local Walmart?
At least then the conversation would be private and wouldn’t lead to 20 additional lurkers taking those same first steps simultaneously.
You’re right that there’s more to the story. When they card is drained by a crook US bank makes you whole, they just take about 6 weeks to do so and make you FAX paperwork. I’ve done it a half dozen times and now drain within the hour of buying US bank MCGC. I don’t know if they’ve plugged the leak or not, haven’t had an issue in a year+.
I get it, I totally do. And of course not an apples-to-apples, but would you say the same if it were knitting, or model plane building, or RC car driving, or hiking, etc? Makes you wonder, and gives good perspective.
While it didn’t seem like an issue with OV cards, I always bought and liquidated near instantly out of fear that I’d have to deal with some BS paperwork and process if this were to ever happen to me. I admit, one time I had $20k worth because of sheer laziness. I got lucky that not a single card was touched, but still something that was a risk. The sad part was, I recognized that I had to liquidate the cards every day, multiple times per day, but the stack of cards sitting on my desk demotivated me. In the end, it took only 10 mins to drain, but still something stupid in retrospect.
Well, all the examples you give are of hobbies where adding more participants generally improves the hobby for those already involved in it. Obviously it makes sense to encourage new participants to join up if you’re involved in such endeavors.
MS is a little difference in that it’s not the kind of hobby that can sustain itself if a significant percentage of the population ever started doing it.
No doubt, and that’s why I said I know it’s not apples-to-apples. But so many people call MS a hobby. In reality, it’s arbitrage and far more than simply a hobby. Some folks do it for a living–which, to me, is scary and a super risky situation. I’d rather put money in penny stocks. But that’s me.
However, we need to keep MS in perspective. It’s not like there is some known finite number of widgets and if you get one, you get one, and if not, you don’t. MS is an ever-changing game of cat and mouse.
That’s risky thinking to engage in for fragile opportunities:
Saying MS is like cat and mouse trivializes that for many people there are only a finite number of avenues their local conditions allow them to pursue. If you live in a smaller city and your only play for a certain part of your MS routine truly is X then losing X would be like the cat corning the mouse and the mouse having nowhere left to run (short of moving to a new city with different conditions or limping along at a significantly reduced capability).
All of these sort of opportunities eventually come to an end. I’ve been around long enough to remember the easy money that was available through online casino bonus hunting. At the time people trivialized it, told their friends who would listen about it, and invited them to pile in. A more recently example would be buying dollar coins from the mint. Many didn’t appreciate the finite nature of these opportunities. In the case of online casino bonus hunting, it was fallout from 9/11 of govt. AML gone awry was what truly did in the proliferation of online casinos, but bonus hunting was already in a death-spiral from new people piling in to the hobby.
You bring up “widgets” so think of it as supply and demand. The more demand you create (bringing new people into the fold), the less supply you leave for those already there. Pharmacists understood this concept when they inflated their required qualifications for newcomers from a BS in Pharmacy to a PharmD degree and realized a tremendous bump in pay.
Surely, you have to have or have had at least one fragile hustle (e.g. reselling a particularly profitable item you want to keep secret on eBay, some credit card related game, or even something entirely different) that you value reducing exposure to. It’s not making you rich, but the extra income is nice. If not then I can see where you might trivialize discretion for these sorts of “deals.” Admittedly, the cow is out of the barn when it comes to most of the common MS methods and spoon-feeding will occur in plenty of places online where motivated people are specifically searching to find info on MS. There’s no stopping that; however, that doesn’t mean it’s advisable to offer circles and arrows of the latest working methods in a beginner-friendly format to people that might be perusing a post as a curiosity and be just the nudge they (and the 20 corresponding lurkers) needed to take that next step.
Hell, even this post is a little risky in the sense that it might make MS sound more exciting and lucrative than it really is. I guess it’s really just more a post about the general principle of keeping one’s mouth shut when they’re in possession of their own special unicorn.
I read your reply while in the car waiting in a parking lot. I didn’t want to respond at the time on my phone. I’m glad I didn’t. My only reaction is: you seem to take this much more seriously than I do. Not that that’s a knock, or a jab, or anything of the sort. I just simply don’t “care” enough about MS for me to have such a finely developed opinion about it. To me, it’s some extra cash on the side. That’s it. I don’t have enough time to do MS “full time” like others do, and thus my profits these days are under $50k per year. They used to be higher, but I was also single and had no responsibility other than paying rent and having cash for beer money.
II don’t think there’s much point in debating the merits or drawbacks of spoon feeding, If you want to share, then share. Assuming you own the play and aren’t bound by an NDA.
This is always a problem with scarce, valuable information. The full timers who rely on it want it secret, and part timers / hobbyists don’t rely on it, so they see no harm in sharing.
A lot of people would be happy with $50k/yr income especially if it’s mostly tax free.
[quote=“Stubtify, post:229, topic:649”]
I don’t know if they’ve plugged the leak or not, haven’t had an issue in a year+.
[/quote]If you meant USB, I don’t think they have because there are still reports coming of newly activated cards as having zero balance hours after they bought it. I don’t have the patience to drain them at WM for special action just to drain them so I just load them to VIPs at Serve with no hassle.
Bottomline for me is whether this (or any FUD/warnings) will deter me from getting my share of the deal while it’s live. I take the necessary precautions but if it’s an ‘easy’ deal with a lot of merchandise for the taking, I’ll definitely buy them as long as the stores allow me.
Remember how ODOM discontinued the deal before the week was over when they noticed overwhelming response from customers? Some may scoff on $15 or $30 profit per transaction while others who bought a few thousands surely enjoyed it; twas paying $85 for $100 worth of plastic money MSers could easily turn back to cash (YMMV of course). As always there were a lot of angry people discrediting others who got into the deal while they didn’t get any; it’ll always be that way, the early birds get the GCs and others can just resort to name calling, insulting and sour graping.
Good to know USBank still sucks. Thanks @Ma_Barker.
I personally think there’s more to it than that with the ODOM early end. People bring unactivated cards into stores and basically hammering ODOM for more than they expected in the promo to cost. As you go up the ladder people get more and more ruthless in their MS.
@jaytrader @Ma_Barker @NotRonJeremy
Regarding the easily available information, I’d like to share my perspective as a noob. I go to FlyerTalk and see the Walmart MO pinned thread. I read the “wiki” portion, which includes bold statements of “spend the next few weeks reading every thread in this post in detail before trying it”
And the thread has around 80 pages - all from 2017 only. If I knew for certain that the short wiki had all the info I needed, I’d have read that and been off to the races. But I didn’t have the energy to read 80 pages, most of which use acronyms that are hard to figure out as an outsider and I couldn’t find a glossary wikied. Most of the acronyms have to be figured out using context clues. I believe “Gebit Card” means “Gift Debit Card” but me as a noob is wondering whether the Wiki has a blatant typo in it the first time I read it, in the wiki itself, with no explanation, and then I wonder if I can trust a wiki with typos in it for accurate information.
It’s frustrating when the experienced people think all of the information is easily available, such as this wiki, but the wiki is only 80% of the way there. The last 20%, such as what each of the acronyms means and how to tell which bank issues a certain card, are missing. I’d almost rather these wikis didn’t exist at all, given they are incomplete, because then people can’t point me to it and then I feel stupid for still not being able to figure it out.
Then there’s misuse of terms used, such as social engineering. Social engineering does not mean being polite to and chatting up a Walmart cashier so she does her job. Social engineering is getting someone to do something they aren’t supposed to do, such as an override. When I read misappropriated terms, it confuses me as a beginner because it leads me to believe that cashiers have a means of overriding POS blocks.
I do appreciate all of your help, just want to make my position as a beginner better understood.
I did my first “MS” today at Walmart. I needed to buy a money order to pay for something that required a money order. What better opportunity than to try out one or more of the visa gift cards I’ve been buying up locally?
I went with 4 cards:
US Passport ID - I wasn’t sure if they’d want to see my drivers license (DL), and DL has a magnetic strip that can be swiped whereas a passport card does not. In general, the only person you should ever hand your DL to is a police officer, while you are driving. Everyone else should get a passport card. If they want to store your information in perpetuity at the bar you go to, or Walmart, let them manually type it into their system by hand. 99.9% of the time, they will shrug, ask for your DL, and when you return the shrug and say “that’s all I got”, they look at the Passport card, grunt, and accept it without inputing any of your stored data. This, my friends is actual “social engineering”
FiveBack card from the Office Depot deal last week. It was a $200 card and the MO I needed to buy was under $200 so one swipe from that would work. I knew it worked as a debit card with the last 4 numbers as the PIN, because I used a different FiveBack card at a POS system to buy something last week and it worked.
Plain black Visa Gift Card with no writing on it. The last 4 digits is not the PIN, it was on a paper inside the package that I threw out, but I was able to quickly call in and set the PIN through an automated phone system. I set the PIN to the last 4 digits of the card. This card had $500 on it
My actual bank Visa Debit card with my name stamped on it. I had enough in the checking account to cover the sub-$200 MO that I legitimately needed.
I stacked the cards so my actual debit card was on top in case they asked to see.
I waited in line with 5 others, who appeared to be typical Wal Mart shoppers. Unbathed, torn clothing, one guy had stuff in his hair. There were 3 cashier, so the line moved relatively fast and took under 5 minutes.
I was called up and said “I’d like to buy two money orders, but I need separate receipts so can you run them as different transactions?”
She asked how much the first was one was for and I did the sub $200 one first. This gave me flexibility. If the FiveBack card didn’t work, I could try the $500 plain visa GC. And if that didn’t work, I had my real debit card. And if it came to that, I’d then say thanks and leave after the first MO. That was the plan.
She typed in the exact amount I asked for and told me to swipe my card. She did not ask for ID nor to look at my card. I swiped the FiveBack card and it immediately prompted me for a PIN. I typed the last 4 in, then it asked if I wanted Cash Back. I pressed no, and that was it - transaction approved.
Then for the second MO I asked for an amount near $500 but not $500, nor $499.30. My assumption is that if I were looking to combat MS, either as a Walmart manager or Bank Deposit Team, I’d be looking for transactions of $499.30, $999.30, possibly $799.30 since it seems that either one $500 card, two $500 cards, or four $200 cards would be what most people who MS use.
So, I asked for a MO for $491.75 with the assumption that it looks more legit both to the cashier and to the bank I deposit it in. I will be responsible to drain the last few dollars through some other means, but I’ve learned from last week’s adventure that I can take a GC, swipe it first at the grocery store, it uses the last few dollars and then prompts me to swipe another card. While this is less efficient, it seems safer. I did not read this method anywhere, I came up with it organically, thinking about how rewards abuse teams might investigate.
Again she asked to swipe a card and I swiped the plain visa card that I got from a grocery store with 6% back from AMEX BCP. The POS system worked identically as the previous one. PIN first, then Cashback? I did not have to press “cancel” or do anything weird or complex. Also, the cashier did not ask for ID nor to see my card.
I estimate that I can make about $20 profit each time I do one $500 card that I bought using the 6% reward card. Buying a MO that drains two GC at the same time ($999.30) would save me 70 cents, but reading people’s experiences make it seem like rocket surgery to swipe multiple cards for the same GC and saving 70 cents isn’t worth a 10% chance of wasting 30 minutes as a manager comes over and voids the transaction or calls an IRS agent over.
Again, not something I read, but came up with organically, that if I am using $500 GCs, I’d rather pay the extra 70 cents and get two MO that are in the $485 to $495 range than one big one. If I was MSing with $200 GCs, I can see how swiping 4 for one transaction would be pretty significant at scale.
I have yet to deposit the $490ish MO into my bank, but I don’t think I can use a Check Scanning phone app - I think I have to physically drop it into an ATM or bank, and due to the possibility of the ATM losing it, I will go inside the bank.
I don’t plan on being a big hitter with MS and don’t want to piss off my one local bank, so I will likely only deposit a few MOs at a time. I plan on not being a huge MSer and really only maxing out my one AMEX BCP card ($6k/year) and possibly doing a little of Office Supply Spend if a deal comes around.
I have a $1500 dentist appointment coming up so I am planning on buying three $500 GC from the grocery store and using those to pay the dentist. I trust the dentist and don’t expect to need to chargeback this amount, nor is there any extended warranty involved.
There’s also a few service based things I need like a $500 car repair coming up - I can use a grocery store bought VGC. My thought is that I might MS about $10k of spend each year with about half going to organic spend and half going into Wal Mart GC. I can make possible $300 or so per year, which is nothing compared to people making $50k, but also with minimal effort and low risk of shut down.
In the future, I plan to not buy the full $500 at the grocery store. I might just buy $495 or so, since the Rewards Abuse Team might be looking for $505.95 transactions. Or I might pair it with regular spend and buy $10 worth of groceries at the same time.
If I did want to MS enough money to earn $50k, I think it would become a huge job because once the 5% category spend and 6% grocery spend are capped, I’d be stuck earning 2% rewards or so which means I need huge volume to make any money. I’d also want a new brick and mortar bank that I don’t care about so if they ditch me for depositing too many MOs, it won’t be an issue. But I imagine having a new account is more suspect, so I’d want an aged account for this purpose which makes this logistically challenging since I’d need to start opening accounts now, to use them for MS in 2+ years.
I’m not as smart as I thought, or i wouldn’t be kicking myself right now for not thinking of that. I can’t wait to try it at Home Depot. I’m tempted to buy something and return it just to see their response. I would not call this social engineering. I would call it using your noggin.[quote=“TripleB, post:241, topic:649”]
Buying a MO that drains two GC at the same time ($999.30) would save me 70 cents, but reading people’s experiences make it seem like rocket surgery to swipe multiple cards for the same GC and saving 70 cents isn’t worth a 10% chance of wasting 30 minutes as a manager comes over and voids the transaction or calls an IRS agent over.
[/quote]
Thank you. I can always use a laugh, or two.
Thank you also for the clear step-by-step style description. I’ve never done MS, and even in this small forum, I see acronyms that cause a pause. Good luck with the dentist.
Congrats, TripleB.
You’ve stumbled on some things that others have taken a long time to discover. Good job.