I just started and am now concerned. Yesterday and today I bought $5,000. each day.......should I buy more tomorrow?? I have a very high credit limited, but don't want to rock any boats? Would appreciate FTs thoughts! thanks

AMEX
 

Took 4 Vrs up to the counter this morn and the kid said he has to ring them up 1 at a time (4 different transactions) I was all :D He never even asked for my DL.

Did a # of other purchases elsewhere and when I got home to check something online with my acct. There was a fraud warning and to call in, I did and said all the transactions are mine and the CC is in my hand. So he says thanks and the 4 @ 503.95 @ CV I take it are for GCS!:eek: Being caught off guard and never expecting that I said I was asked if instead of ringing everything up in 1 transaction if it can be rung up over several and I said do as many as you want to, which is the truth.

So it seems the fraud dept is on to what everyone is doing. I hit Amex hard last statement for the RLIs for my TM card, was about to hit it as hard if not harder the next few weeks for VRs but now I will scale it back abit. I do a large # of reg purchases but the $ value is very low per transaction.

Fraud is totally different than MS. Fraud involves theft and unauthorized purchases. MS involves authorized purchases made by the legitimate cardholder.

If the fraud department is doing their job, they just verify that the purchases were made by the cardholder. It is the "perk abuse" department that would care about MS.

Had my first face-to-face with VR competitor this afternoon at my usual CVS :D
Now I know who's been hiding them behind GameStop cards.

If your concerned then maybe you should stop. I wouldn't rely on what other people do as every situation is different.

Let's be realistic here. Amex has known what is going on for a long time. Don't for a second think you know about something they don't. With the blogs blasting out about MS methods it would take a completely incompetent company to not figure out what all those expenses are at CVS. My fear is once too many people start doing it then action will be taken.

Or you could have the situation like I posted about a couple of days ago where the CVS cashier insisted on calling AmEx to verify my card number and address on file while mentioning that I was trying to buy $5000 in gift cards. :eek:

I think there's two things to take from this. Credit card comfort levels and CVS comfort levels. The discussion started moving toward CVS probably shutting this down at some point - although they may not. We also have to worry about Bluebird shutting this down at some point. Clearly other cards that load VR's have deemed this a risk and suspicious, and it's surprising Bluebird has not.

Now, there's a theoretical chance you have cards from Navy, Penfed, BofA, WF, Chase, AMEX, FIA, Citi, etc.. so you could probably do 70-100k without even going over 1x your limits or trip off credit card companies - so how much varies from person to person.

People have been saying it's the end since the beginning. :D I'm surprised it hasn't ended, but we've been going strong since October 2012. ^

Did you smack him upside the head for being an idiot?

+1^

He was in his 60's. And the reason I know it was him is because when I grabbed my stack of 5 VRs there was a bunch of them left. I rang them up and decided to do another 5 on different card. Came back and there was only 3 left. I was like what the ...? And then I went back to register and heard "That would be 5 thousand and 54 dollars (something like that)", I knew this was the bieatch :mad:

I also feel like there will always be new opportunities out there. A company will want to market a new product, and they can use MS as a loss leader to build market share.

This is just one lowly clerk at one store. Why on Earth would that make you fear that MS through VRs will disappear? Is he secretly the Lord of Shutdowns?

I had a quite different experience while buying GCs at OM. The clerk, who has dealt with me many times, asked me if I had done the math and if it was really worth it. I gave a short explanation of what it cost and what I gained, and then he just shook my hand.

Oh no, the sky is falling!