Future of MS
 

I thought this would be an interesting topic to discuss. What do you think will be the future of MS or what do you expect to see going forward?

My thoughts;

1. Direct loads of OV or DC to BB.
2. VISA/MC lowering fees to retailers. In turn a retailer will step to fill the lost sales of VBs.

Cancer - New to the forum, although I've been following this site and FW for a while. I have been trying to decipher a few of the acronyms. Can you give me a heads up on OV, DC, BB, and VB. I have ideas of what they might mean but want to be sure. Hopefully you don't mine helping a noob out.

I'll help you out once just because you'll get flamed for not doing research by others.

OV = One Vanilla (Visa GC)
DC = Debit Card
BB = Bluebird
VB = I think a misspelling for VR.
VR = Vanilla Reloads (VRs are dead at CVS stores due to the recent 'Cash Only' policy back on 4/4)

Eric is playing nice today! :cool:

Real sustainable ms will be business as usual for most. Lots of work.

There will be some company that failed to take into account people who abuse holes, and that will create a temporary opportunity until too many buy them and it costs the company money.... Ie the mint, serve in store reloads, what is now happening with tmobile. These were all 100% free ms.

To a lesser extent vanilla reloads.

Thanks Eric, I appreciate the help.

I had them all pegged right except for the OV. All I could come up with was "other visa" since the vanillas are pretty much dead.

I am always nice!!!!;)

I hope it doesn't get any easier.

The easier it gets, the more people do it, and it becomes over saturated. A few years ago, I would never hear of anyone else doing this. But about two months ago a friend down the street came up to me and told me their aunt had just gotten a black card in the mail in a nice envelope and was going to CVS to buy points. I knew exactly what card he was speaking of and how it was being done. Its not anymore tho.

I prefer the having to talk face to face and having to make several trips for
my MS activities. The VR via BB via CVS was just too easy. With the current method you need thick skin when something goes wrong..like a red light at the WM kiosk, or how to answer when your banker gets suspicious about MO.

Frankly, I find the way Im doing now is a much faster way even though it requires more work. I look forward to the current methods being around for a long time.

Visa/MC lowering fees is what you don't want to happen. If swipe fees that Visa/MC/AmEx charge are lowered via law, that is when the game gets shot to pieces. Activation fees to a lesser extent as well.

See what happened to debit card rewards after laws mandated lower swipe/interchange fees on those products. All we've got left that gives 1 mile per dollar is Suntrust, with a $75 yearly fee and a fraud team that operates on a hair trigger.

Well, there are some other checking/debit card accounts that reward miles, but at $2/mile or so.

There are three components to this game...

Purchase Rewards - what is your profit before fees and time investment? Good cards will get you 2-5%, and there are ways to increase on under earning cards. As well, personal value to a card is essential. Some people value different programs different ways, and personal preference on a certain chain (or type of reward) can make or break usage on a card.

In - How do you purchase the asset using available credit from the card?

Out - How do you liquidate the asset and repay the CC?

The CVS shutdown killed lots of easy In easy Out methods. Convenient, mostly transactional, simply processes. Scale-able as well, for people with dependents or pseudo-dependents.

There are still plenty of working paths, although most have higher cpd/cpm/cpp rates. Most also have higher soft costs of time/hassle requirements. But like anything else, arbitrage is simply a matter of getting the process right, and then ramping to available resources.

Someone mentioned in another thread about floating money from CCs to pay Taxes via MS. The same thing can be done and put in other (safe) investments, if you stagger your closing dates properly and have proper limits. While not generally discussed, these methods are just another way to increase your profits (or decrease cpd/cpm/cpp).

Banksters cannot afford to stop MS. One day their Questionable business practice of holding the funds hostage will be a class action and they will pay billions in fines, so they will be shut down and the posters here will blame the bloggers, as always!

Thats when U (your funds) will be taken hostage! This FT website is well known and everyone is aware of smallest aspects of the 'process' Every step of the process is open, deliberate and known to both MSers and the banksters that offers....

There will always be opportunities at the fringes.

Banks like plausible deniability, and they really really like money laundering. (Because it makes them a lot of money.) With a steady background noise of MS going on, it makes actual money laundering and fraud significantly harder to detect. They have every reason to want to keep us around, and only shut down any given opportunity when it starts costing them a lot of money.

I don't disagree, They know what MSing is, why do they keep messing with MSers "pattern of suspicious activity"? an excuse to hold their funds hostage and questionable business practice? In some cases they have not even done few thousand total MSing.