I learned about AP a couple of months ago after I bought the "wrong" Vanilla card (the ones you can't load to Bluebird) and needed a way to "get rid of it." I've since experimented a bit to see what works and what doesn't.

What does seem to work is having my wife send me up to $1000 in gift cards in a calendar month. No problems at all. $500 Vanillas, any other gift card, etc. As long as she doesn't send me more than $1000 in a calendar month, it's fine. She's even sent me gift cards with my own name attached. I've kept the money flowing only one way (wife to me), to avoid the problems other folks have mentioned here.

What hasn't worked so well is setting up AP accounts in my under-18 children's names and trying to send us money, or send money between themselves. They all have SS numbers, and bank accounts in their own names. I've gotten a couple transactions through, but then they've been shut down. Not officially, but when I try to send money from them, I get error messages.

I set up the kids' AP accounts to get around the $1000 monthly limit, but obviously that isn't working (even though some of them already had regular Amazon accounts to take advantage of free Prime offers). And that's OK with me, because unless I'm churning gift cards, $1000 a month is enough to get rid of the random gift cards I wind up with. For instance, Penfed credit cards now pay their cashback in gift cards instead of statement credits. I can dump these gift cards that way. And I've taken advantage of supermarkets giving me free food for buying gift cards (like $60 in store credit if you buy a $500 gift card). $1000 a month takes care of these gift cards. I'd love to have the flexibility to "cash in" more, but this is still a very useful tool.