It's one of those things where the IRS will eventually get suspicious. If your sales always basically equals your refunds, etc. You'll have to file a return for your business so that's a hassle. Once you've gone through the trouble of setting all this up w/ business bank accounts, separate books, tax filings, and netted out the merchant costs, is it worth it? The volume would have to be pretty high to make this worthwhile. CC transactions are now automatically reported so you'll have to reconcile all that when you do your taxes.

And here's another risk - you're tying your credit cards to a merchant account. So if an issue ever arises w/ your merchant account, they can shut your cards down. Years back I had a business, then I sold the business. During the transition, someone initiated a CC dispute. We didn't know about this because we sold the business to an out of state company and they moved everything so the business mailing address/phone numbers were all changed. One day maybe 6 months after the sale, my wife's Discover card stops working. We had no idea why so we called and the reps had no idea why either, they said wait for the letter. Basically we got the letter and it stated that because she was the one who had set up out merchant accounts and set up the acceptance of Discover cards on that account, they basically considered her responsible for the lack of response to the chargeback inquiry. So they terminated her card account. The chargeback was in the amount of $70 and because of that, they cancelled her card which she'd had for 11 years. I'm not even 100% sure how they did that since the business was an LLC and totally separate from our personal finances, but her name was the one on the merchant account so they linked them. Obviously an extreme case, but it's not that different than people getting bank accounts shut down with CC's from the same institution.

So if they find an issue w/ your merchant account for offloading all those gift cards, you could have credit cards shut down even though you never processed your own cards through the merchant account.