Agreed ... now pm me all of your secrets!

Thanks. Good to know, but what's the basis of this? Your review of various FT threads and posts?

With all due respect,

There are many posts on this forum and this thread along the lines of: don�t share the secrets, it will ruin if for everyone. Isn�t the entire point of FlyerTalk to share information, be it considered secretive or not? If not, I�d appreciate it very much if someone would tell me which information should be shared and which shouldn�t be shared, apparently I�m not a very good judge of which is which. Thank you.

I'd tell you which info should and shouldn't be shared, but it's a secret.

Boy, oh, boy! All those pretzels make me chuckle.

Every "dark artist" here who thinks you can just "shush" information in this day and age, I have a few words for you: "THE CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG", and it ain't going back in, either. This secret society thinking is simply laughable to say the least.

Do you really, honestly believe that banks do not know about our little shenanigans? After all the exposure on CNN, WSJ, NYT, not even counting who knows how many bloggers - who the hell does not know about credit card churning? If they wanted to shut it down, they would, and they still might, but not because a few or a few dozens of Flyertalk members decide to share their wisdom with outsiders. Credit card churners will ALWAYS remain a tiny minority - a mere pimple on the face of the faceless population for giants like Citi, Amex, or Chase. You want to know why - think how many of your own friends and relatives have taken on churning after you told them. In my experience the number is ZERO.

So, please don't worry. You can yell about it from the Empire State Building or Oprah Show - that wouldn't change a thing. Most people are lazy, conservative, and most of all scared silly to try unconventional things. As to those who are more adventurous - how many of them, do you think, have the credit needed to go in this game? How many have the cash flow or stamina to play with gift cards in order to meet spending requirements?

Our secret is perfectly safe or it would be if there was really a secret. There is not! Please keep sharing

And Dr. Jabadski - great job. Thanks for the list. Helped me a couple times already.

I think this attitude is a little cavalier.

I've been through this argument several times in various communities. In my view, it boils down to this:
The US Mint is a good example. Once that method got national attention, it was fixed within weeks and now can't be used.

In my experience, the most prudent approach is to work on a barter type of system. The focus should be on trading information, not giving it away for free. That way you get out of it what you put in. The more research and investigation you do, the more valuable your knowledge becomes and the more you can leverage that knowledge to trade with others.

There will always be folks that want everyone to share information. Sometimes these are beginners who don't have any secrets of their own and are trying to learn. Sometimes it's folks that have a certain ideology about giving back to their community. Sometimes there are folks who haven't thought through the long-term consequences of their actions. Sometimes it's folks that stand to profit from sharing the information i.e. bloggers.

Either way, they are frequently the most vocal ones on the forums and it makes sense to be vocal. If you have very few secrets of your own or you benefit from sharing those secrets then it's in your best interest to try and get everyone else to tell you theirs.

However, it's not in the best interest of the community to widely share information in the long run. If everything was shared quickly and widely then everything would be fixed quickly and no one would be able to gain much benefit.

If, however, you focus on research and trading information then those who put in the time and effort to discover these methods are primarily the ones who benefit from them. This seems to be a much more sustainable model to me.

My two cents.

Indeed, the Mint obviously knew for a long time what was going on but let it ride, probably since it was helping their project managers show "results" as measured by sales of the coins. They put in place some mild restrictions after the first big round of attention, but it was still easily workable for awhile longer - until the last big article/radio bit where the Mint had no choice but to respond to cut it off.

I think there's a difference between the information being known and loosely "out there", and waving big red flags that may force another crackdown similar to the Mint situation. Yes, FT exists to share information. Somewhere there is a balance between the two extremes.

Although I have to agree with this I just have to add an important point.
It was not us that killed the US Mint coins. We only account for a very very small overall % of all the coins that were minted.
If anyone had read between the lines during the congressional hearings then the main fact of why they shut down the minted coins was the fact that the coins were not being circulated as intended. The main purpose of the coins was to replace the delicate paper dollar. After they found out that Billions of coins remained in storage (uncirculated) that proved the program was a bust and the main reason coins were stopped.

Maybe varies with individuals but I had applied for another Chase card over 30months after approval of last card and although a new card was approved, the bonus miles were denied due to not being a new member.

I also heard Amex had started clamping down on their cards also for non-1st timers. (although this I can't verify yet as I have yet to apply for another card).

Freez

In my experience, with Chase being able to get a 2nd bonus depends on the card and a few others things. I was able to get a 2nd bonus on my Marriott Premier card within 15 months. However they denied me a 2nd bonus on BA card even though I had put a different FF #. So yes, Chase is quite sophisticated and probably better than most but its system has its own loopholes .

That's a good point and I hadn't meant that FT'ers were the cause of it. I really don't know what or who was the root cause, just after the last NPR story got things boiling again, it went down. Though I know some spears were thrown at some members after the shutdown, I was never involved in the coins game - just watched from the peanut gallery

You're welcome and thank you very much mnscout. I enjoyed reading your eloquent comments, which I basically agree with, and especially appreciate the quote above. Interesting that apparently there are people who think it�s fine for them to read all our �secrets� here yet they are unwilling to share their secrets, lest it be �ruined� for all. Seems rather selfish and one-sided to me.

Exactly! Mint didn't pull the plug because of flyertalkers. They were perfectly willing to finance their endeavor, but it simply didn't go anywhere. Coins were not put into the circulation, so they pulled the plug having realized the whole idea just wasn't working. Come to think of it, it was destined to failure from the beginning - coins are simply too large and heavy, and it's too inconvinient to carry them compared to paper. Also, one dollar has not yet devalued to the point of no importance, although we are certainly going there and fast

Even if there hadn't been any "minting" games at all, they would've pulled the plug one way or another. What choice did they have, really?

Guys, we are a niche, and as such we are simply not important enough to the likes of Chase and Citi. Stop worrying. They will not change the way they do business because of us.

Obviously, mnscout does not know about the mint debacle. I suggest he read on the mint's website why the mint shutdown the nations's only egalitarian entitlement program. Sure, the cardinals (audit, fraud and loss professionals) of the banks know all about finding heretics. But nobody listens to them because they are cardinals, and management ain't keen on hearing Sunday school lectures about the risks of letting heretics go unpunished.

It takes someone tweaking the nose of management to make them wake up and order the cardinals to do a witch hunt. Not to worry, there is always someone making money from a blog, or a referral program with an incentive to attract attention by sensationalizing the dark arts of the heretics, and a few heretics tempted by a minute of fame to come forward and publicly confess their sins. Their minute of fame gives the rest of the heretics their minute of flame.

So shadup you on the empire state building beating your chest - remember climbing up there and attracting attention didn't end up so well for King Kong!

The point of this is not whether to share information or not....we do, it's burried in thousands of threads which requires learning the lingo, searching and reading. Paying your dues and working for the info....this weeds out the lazy and ignorant people who think it's too much of a hassle and not worth their time.....which in the long run will keep things going and hardly raise an eyebrow at a corporate level.
On the other hand there are those people who want something for nothing, read slickdeals, fatwallet, and bloggers who spoonfeed the pertinent info to greedy, ignorant masses who just want theirs. They dont care if the loophole lasts another year as long as the get thiers, and they blast it over and over until the deal dies. (think AMEX CSR point bumps and getting targeted offers matched) What works and goes unnoticed for 10,000 people will be noticed and killed when 100,000 get wind of the deal and repeat steps 1,2,3 learned on slickdeals. (Hence the term Slickdeal effect) even though the first rule is never call, the majority of people there have no finesse or self control, they usually call and ask dumb questions, draw attention to the deal, and kill it.
I found if you have to dig for answers in a forum like FT and don't have it spoonfed by some blowhard blogger, who makes money regurgitating info found here in the hopes they get more readers and in turn more ad revenue and refferal money, you are less likely to blow a deal by blabbing to anyone but trusted friends.
The question is not to share or not to share....all the info is out there.
the question is whether to spoonfeed it to the masses or save it for those willing to put in the effort to research and learn.
Once again this is all off topic, and the original topic is flawed as credit card churning basically died when Citi shut down the AA cards short churn time...partially in response to all the new people that learned about it here and exploited it. The time limits and churnability of remaing cards varies and has variables that make it impossible to make a wiki list. If your interested in getting a second bonus on a card research the threads on it and study the data points left by others, this will give you an idea but not a sure fire timetable.
Oh and there are a few good ideas that are not on these boards and are circulated through PM by established members. (don't PM me looking for info either) There are some people who don't want their goldmine opened to blabbermouth bloggers and FW and SD greedy trolls.
If too much info is shared and deals start dying then this will become the way to kill the blogs that have no original ideas....which is basically most of them.