AP isn't a big part of my MS strategy but what I do to get around payments going to someone else's bank account is use PayPal. I have A, B and C AP accounts. C is my personal account, B is in my dad's name and A is my girlfriend. I only ever send CC/GC payments from A to B or B to C. Never any other way and everything is in one direction. If going B to C I obviously just cash out the money to my own bank account. If I'm going A to B, I cash out to my dads bank account, wait a week so I know the funds have arrived and then log in to his PayPal account and send the same amount to my PayPal account as a gift so no fee is collected. Keeps things simple and helps keep me off Amazon's radar while cashing out $2K in AGCs a month.

I might have to recruit some more family members in the next few days though with the upcoming 5x gas reward points on AGCs next week at Giant.

Opened my 2nd round of AP accts couple of months ago after previous shutdown, only doing simple me->SO with <1K per month, now my acct is suspended (SO's is not).

I'm following AP's rule strictly, what could be the cause of acct suspension? Didn't close my previous AP accts even they are shutdown? Using the same address for my and SO's accts?

Response from AP about the suspension doesn't really give any detail or when the review will be completed.

Greetings from Amazon Payments.

To ensure that all parties have the best experience using Amazon Payments, we conduct reviews of Amazon Payments accounts. This action is undertaken regularly on Amazon Payments accounts. Unfortunately, at this time, we are not able to approve your request for an Amazon Payments Account based on our review of your intended use of our payments service.

Your account is restricted and cannot be used to initiate any future transactions. While we appreciate your interest, your account is restricted and cannot be used to initiate any transactions until our review is complete.

Thank you for your interest in Amazon Payments.

Sincerely,

Account Specialist
Amazon Payments

Man, oh man. Bezos tribe is out in full force lately.
I haven't even conducted this months AP transfers.

Normally when you add a prepaid card with the right info, they put a $1 hold on the card, which means you won't be able to totally drain it right away. The "trick" is to add the card with the wrong expiration date, then go back and edit it to the right date, then process the transaction.

Sent my first AP transfer from A>B (still have C&D waiting on the sidelines). It immediately went to pending and a few hours later I got a call asking to verify the payment.

They let the payment through but it appears B doesn't have the full limits yet. It says I need to add a credit card (which I have). There is still a $1 pending payment on the card since 5/10. Does that need to clear first before the limits are increased?

For the past three months my payments have been stuck "pending" for 5-10 hours before being approved. Today, I was pleasantly surprised to have my first payment of the month approved immediately.

So after getting the transfer to go through, I tried withdrawing from account B to Serve. The withdraw failed and now I can't log in with that account (says credentials are incorrect even though I've reset the password). Thoughts?

do you issue AP transactions at night? i noticed if you issue AP transactions say 9PM PST or later it can be delayed until the next morning. If you do the transaction during normal "business" hours then the transaction goes through almost immediately.

I don't think we're going to be of any help to you. I think you're going to have to contact AP to see where your money is and if you can get access to it via that account.

What triggers AP reporting to IRS?
 

I read somewhere that a certain number of AP payments (like 40 some-odd per year) could cause Amazon to report your transactions to the IRS. But I also read elsewhere that you have to run more than $20,000 a year through an account to trigger reporting. Does anyone know what the real story is?

I often use AP to drain small amounts of money (like 10 bucks) from mostly-depleted gift cards so I can toss them. If lots of small transactions would trigger a 1099, I obviously don't want to do this.

From the Amazon FAQs:
Due to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations, U.S. third-party settlement organizations and payment processors, including Amazon, are required to file Form 1099-K for U.S. taxpayer sellers who meet the following thresholds in a calendar year:

More than $20,000 in unadjusted gross sales, and
More than 200 transactions.

Those are the terms when they are REQUIRED to send it, but if they are like Paypal then there is a chance if you pass one of the two that they will send it anyway.

I've used evolve to drain small $$$ from gift cards for paying our electric bills. I limited the number of cards to 4 per bill (ymmv). Worked just fine.

But isn't that for folks who sell merchandise on Amazon? I could certainly understand why that would be the case. Any reason to believe it applies to folks making payment for things? From a tax collection standpoint, that would make less sense.


I'm not sure if there have been recent reports, but I recall reading a couple reports on flyertalk that some folks who used Evolve Money but did not totally drain their gift cards have had money stolen. I'm a bit sensitive to this because I have been a victim of the Target X-mas security breach, where somebody got ahold of my Target prepaid debit card number and pin, made a duplicate card, and drained my balance. So I try to use Evolve only when I'm going to completely drain a card. I think Amazon is "safer."

Where did you read this? I have heard people saying they heard about it but I have not read anything yet. I haven't seen any reports on the Evolve Money thread on here.