Data Point(s)-stories of people’s experience with a product/retailer.
You know how fatwallet cash back was a great way to drive down costs for things you buy online? These giftcards are online purchases.
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For those who are interested in MS loopholes, there’s a lot of them in flyertalk…ONLY if you’ll invest time to read and understand. For those who prefer not to read hundreds of pages and want to be spoonfed, there are bloggers offering MS tutorial for $100/hour…
Social engineering is also vital in this game, those who are perceived to bring something of value to others are likely be invited to private forums discussions.The ones who are perceived as moochers just whine and sour grape on flyertalk to discredit others.
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I think law-enforcement encounters are a valid concern in the MS world. I’ve personally been interviewed by two different federal agencies. One was related to buying MOs, the other was related to buying VGCs. I wouldn’t say it’s a specific volume that gets their attention (although if you’re doing a significant volume of MS you’re bound to pop up on their radar at some point) so much as a random chain of events leading to them being in your business. Fortunately, in my case (just like in Tashir’s) neither encounter led to a negative outcome for me, but that should not be assumed.
First of all, you don’t have to be engaged in money-laundering or anything drug-related for your activity to be illegal. As a thought experiment, let’s say someone were MSing just $2,000 at a time, but for convenience instead of stopping at the bank on every MS run, they did it every 5th MS run so that each deposit was just under $10,000. Most MS methods don’t involve physical currency, but if yours did you could likely be convicted of structuring. Going to argue that your intent wasn’t to avoid having your deposit reported by keeping it under $10k? There are plenty of instances (just Google structuring to see how rampantly the government has abused this in the past) where perfectly innocent shop owners were convicted for structuring even though the cash deposits from their register just happened to be under that magic number. Even though their reason for keeping the deposits below $10k was to mitigate their own risk of being robbed on the way to the bank (and this seems like a perfectly reasonably way to do that) it didn’t stop them from being convicted. Admittedly, this is a bit of a long-shot, but it’s a perfect example of being convicted of breaking the law in regards to bank deposits when it sure doesn’t feel like you are.
Another very real risk is civil forfeiture. Rules vary by state, but Tashir was lucky he didn’t get pulled over in rural-Texas with a pocket full of VGCs. There are plenty of stories out there of perfectly innocent people having their cash and cash-equivalents seized by LEA. Some small towns along Texas interstates are known for pulling over commuters for dubious reasons and seizing the contents of their wallets. Now had this happened to him there’s a good chance he could have gotten his property returned to him by going to court, but that’s certainly not guaranteed and there’s an expense involved with that. Think I’m exaggerating this risk? See this news story on police departments purchasing a device to aid in seizing the funds stored on prepaid debit cards.
It’s also worth noting that standard best-practices are to never talk to the police. That video offers numerous examples where perfectly innocent people found themselves in legal trouble as a result of being open and honest with the police (you’ll be surprised if you haven’t seen it before), but that leaves you with quite the quandary if some over-zealous Walmart employee called the cops on you and you’re trying to decide how to handle the situation. You’re then caught in a catch 22 since you know you’re not supposed to talk to the police without having your lawyer present, but asserting your right in that regard probably means all the employees are going to see is you being arrested and taken away by police, assume you must be up to something illegal, and that alone is probably enough to burn your bridge with them.
With all that said, my goal here isn’t to scare you away from MSing, but to offer a balanced perspective to go along with the “even if the cops get called it’s not going to be a big deal” example offered up with Tashir’s story. If you’re not good at dealing with conflict and the thought of being interrogated by law enforcement scares you to death then this may not be the best hobby for you to get seriously involved in. Of course, if the prospect of that excites you then this may be a positive selling point for MS. 
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This is why I never got into MS. Every 6 months or so I get the idea that it might be worthwhile. And I dig into 100+ pages threads on Flyertalk, the old FWF, Reddit, etc. Only to find the threads filled with arcane acronyms only understable to people in the thread, and about 1/3 of the posts are people asking basic questions with established posters replying that they won’t spoonfeed people. Using the exact term “spoonfeed.”
And then I’d start reading at the beginning of the 100+ pages only to find out by page 50 that everything I read no longer applies because point-of-sale systems were changed or one company changed their policies.
I do understand why many don’t want to outline exactly what they do, because that’s how things get shutdown. I find it odd though that some sharing is okay but too much sharing is not okay. In my mind I’d either share everything or nothing.
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Yeah man, I absolutely hate the anti-spoonfeeding comments. If you really feel that way, just don’t reply at all. How does telling newbies that you refuse to “spoonfeed” them help at all? It’s as if EVERYONE has pounded the pavement and figured out MS methods. In reality, it’s very few people, and everyone else just copies them. BUT! Because the copycats have their system in place, and have been doing it for a while, they feel entitled to tell newbies to pound sand. I never understood it, never agreed with it, and frankly thought it was very egotistical.
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Does anyone know if you can make Moneygram payments via Visa Gift Cards? My apartment lets me pay rent with Moneygram on a $4 fee per payment, no cap. I might be able to pay 2 months worth of rent at a time.
However, I don’t know if Moneygram will allow me to show up with a dozen $200 “FiveBack” Visa Gift Cards that I got from OfficeMax/Depot during this week’s promotion, assuming I can even get 2 per day before they run out.
Perhaps Moneygram might let me use $500 cards, and if they let me use 2 per transaction then that would be a 0.4% fee on my end and I could put $1k of my monthly rent on GCs each month? Then even if I only get 2% rewards on the GCs, it’s still 1.6% gains. But then I have to ask if saving $16 per month is worth standing in line at Moneygram.
It’s kind of comparable to the old FW Online Auction forum. People there were happy to share best practices for PayPal seller protection, but weren’t about to give out their eBay user IDs or their unicorns. Of course, different people have different ideas as to what’s privileged information and what’s common knowledge.
It works, but there’s no magic bullet, or replacement for driving around and trying stuff. It’s hugely variable by region on what works. If you want to pay for money grams with prepaids- start going to money gram places and try it. There are tons of vendors that use Moneygram. I didn’t have any luck at one major retailer in my area, but that doesn’t mean you won’t. Each vendor set their own rules.
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When you’re out there testing theory try to stick to a real debit card. Helps you find out what works and then drill down the different prepaid that do or don’t work with it.
Also helps cashier’s get to know you. There’s a lot of social engineering in this game too.
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Definitely, in MS everything is local, especially these days. In the past Walmart kiosks all worked consistently, as did Vanilla Reloads and Paypal MyCash cards. Now it is extremely cashier dependent. The easily generalizable ways to do things which do not require human intervention are tax payments, Kiva, paying other bills with Tio or Plastiq, and opening bank accounts with credit cards (Doctor of Credit regularly chronicles these).
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Like other trades, it takes labor, time, and testing/training. And more importantly, there are various risks (e.g., AA, loss of rewards) involved. It is definitely not for everyone, and for those who dare, the trade of risk tolerance vs. reward is different for each.
It is not free money.
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But.But.But I read a blog that says it is all free!?
Good point,
And keep in mind there’s what the register will allow, and then there’s store policy on whether they’ll actually allow it. This is the main reason why people’s results are so variable.
The difference is that this is not a “trade” because you are not creating economic value. You’re extracting economic value from others and the reason it’s time consuming and requires testing is because the entities you are attempting to extract value from are actively trying to block you.
It’s the economic equivalent to robbing people at gunpoint and those people are changing their routes to work every morning and you have to figure out where they changed to. Except, of course, no violence is involved in MS. It is a zero sum game played against entities who wished you didn’t play it. Unlike actual trades such as plumbing whereby you are creating economic value for the other party.
I think he was speaking of a trade in a zero-sum market like a futures exchange, One party wins at the counterparties expense.
if the current environment requires a lot of social engineering whats the difference with trying to social engineer a cashier into giving you a iphone for free?
Both parties are voluntarily engaging in that futures exchange, and they are doing it willingly, possibly for a net positive outcome for both parties, regardless of the specific individual trade outcome.
For example, suppose I own a house in Texas with oil rights and I’m able to sell them. The value of those oil rights is contingent on the value of crude oil. If I want to insure against a drop in crude oil pricing so I can keep my cash flow steady and pay my mortgage, I might make a trade on the future market that hedges against crude oil dropping. If crude drops, I make a profit, if it increases in price, I lose money on the specific trade.
The entity that engages in this trade with me is an airliner who wants to hedge against increases in fuel cost. The airliner sells tickets 6 months in advance and if oil costs double, they’ll lose money, so they take the opposite end of the trade with me, whereby if oil goes up, they make money on the trade and it goes down, they lose money.
However, regardless of the outcome of this individual trade, both of us are net winners economically. If crude goes up my futures position loses money but the value of my oil rights increases so my cash flow remains neutral. If crude goes down, the future position the airliner has loses money but they save money on reduced operations costs for ticket prices they locked in at higher crude prices. So they win overall even though they lost on the trade.
In MS, there’s one winner and there’s one loser. And the loser doesn’t want to play the game, that’s why they keep trying to change the rules to avoid the game from being played.
I don’t mean to turn this into an ethical argument against MS. I’m doing a little myself right now. I do want to point out that the reason MS is difficult is not because there’s an inherent economically useful skill involved like learning plumbing or auto repair. And as a whole, our economy shrinks a little bit because MS is taking place, unlike actual trades like plumbing where the economy as a whole expands.
I get your point and agree MS isn’t really economically useful to society. But Not all futures traders are hedgers, and even they would prefer to win.
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One is legal and the other isn’t.
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I’d say whether MS is worth it would depend on your alternatives. I’m unemployed/retired, so it makes sense for me, but I wouldn’t waste my leisure time making $25/hour or its mileage equivalent if I had a better-paying professional job. Or an extra couple of zeros on my net worth.
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