Originally Posted by
jsmith50
Even without this program, there are other ways to do the same thing. Some people use their AmEx to buy pre-paid VISA cards. Pay a small fee for the card (often less than $5) and then pay to load up the money on the card with your AmEx. Takes the mint out of the loop and you achieve the same thing (more or less).
Then what do you do with the pre-paid Visa? I guess it's good if you are short of a threshhold in December and have a bunch of spend planned right around the corner in January.
But barring that, whatever you load onto the Visa is just prepaying for stuff you would have otherwise used your AmEx on later, so you're not really gaining any ground... or you swipe the prepaid card on something like Square, but then you incur a 2-3% fee and risk running afoul of merchant regs.