gotcha, I'm sensing the trend basically anywhere you cant load for 5% and/or fee free.

any other uses for AGCs, esp creative ones?

I plan to use them to prepay rent since I can pay with cc in my online portal. Max fee is $37 for me. Essentially takes $100 off every 1.5 months.

I'm using one to pay my car insurance, since they'll take any CC. 5% on car insurance is pretty nice, as there's no other way to do well on that one.

Mostly, if you have a 5% drugstore its a nice extra layer of benefits atop whatever else you'd be doing.

Anyone know if using these as the CC to load Serve results in problems a-la using debit-like GCs for the debit option? I'd test myself, except my physical card isn't here yet.

You cannot use AGC to load Serve.

This guy is great! Thanks!

Crap. I was hoping maybe it could be used as the CC option. Eh, other methods exist anyway.

in either case it wouldnt be worth it with a small denom AGC that you'd have to switch out for every card. not to mention picking some up from CVS it'd be non-personalized anyways.

Well, found one one-time edge-case use:

ISIS Serve has $20 bonus on $40 purchase (if you have Verizon as your carrier, at least). CVS has tap-to-pay. $50 AGC hit that nicely.

I guess if you're OK with ending up with a lot of small (~$20) cards you can 'churn out' the ISIS/Serve $1 bonus per >=$1 spent for the month. :/

Came across a curious phenomenon in a couple of local CVS stores. There were doing so well selling the OV cards, that their display spaces were totally cleaned out. According to one friendly store manager, it's not the ms crowd that likes them this time. Apparently the OV's are also the only route to transfer money out of Venezuela.

How does an OV bought in the US help transfer money out of Venezuela? Nevermind that you wouldn't want to transfer USD out of Venezuela since they are so valuable there currently.

GC can also not be used outside the US so they don't help transfer dollars into Venezuela either - where dollars carry high value at the moment due to their currency problems.

You're converting from a currency with a government imposed exchange rate of 6.3 VEF to 1 USD. The black market rate is much higher, but a credit card transaction would be required to use this fixed exchange rate. Since there are currency controls in place, it's difficult if not impossible to change bolivars to dollars at a normal currency exchange. Buying OVs would cause the exchange to happen at the government's rate while getting your money into a hard currency.

Same goes for Argentina.

If you have a credit card that is issued in Argentina or Venezuela you can buy a $500 OV in the US and when you go home you pay your bill in local currency which uses official artificially low exchange rate. Of course if you can liquidate OV (for example, sell $500 OV for $450 cash) then you can take the cash back to your home country and exchange it to local currency at black market exchange rate. This makes 5% cash back look like child's play. I believe in Venezuela, official exchange rate is under 1:10 but black market exchange rate is like 1:30 or something.

Ahh. Wasn't thinking Venezuelan issued CC.


Article

Still, that is a yearly cap per person from what I read. I'm assuming Venezuelan credit card companies do enforce that limit.

Even with hordes of Venezuelans I wouldn't think a couple cards per person is going to affect supply that much. We MSers eat through a bunch of those.

Wow, very juicy opportunities for arbitrage indeed! I bet the system in those countries is constantly adjusting, while folks continue to invent ways to game the changing rules (just like we do).