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.

The future of MS is right here on FlyerTalk. By that I mean carefully reading the threads that pique your interest, trying to learn what others are doing and sharing your own ideas, and then figuring out how you can apply the things you learn here to your own situation.

I actually disagree.

By the time a new ground breaking method is discovered, a few folks were already using it for quite a while.

Now, FT is a great place to develop the method, however once it is here, and then disseminated through all the blogs and other forums, it is typically too late.

Add in the fact that this forum has turned extremely hostile over the past few months, and significantly worse since CVS, I see more methods being kept private, or on private forums.

Obviously there are some methods that will be extremely difficult to kill, no matter how many people MS... that would be something like buying gift cards and cashing them in for money orders.

For that to die, you would need to stop the ability to buy gift cards with cc, and there are currently so many places you can do that, and then change the law to not allow debit use.

When talking specific methods that hinge on a niche item, be it amazon payments, reloadits, and what we have seen with Serve reloads... all it takes is that one hole to be fixed and the game is over.

IE... You can only reload Serve with CC in one place... CVS. Bam, done.
You can pretty much buy VR with CC only in CVS.... bam, done.
Mint.... done.
Reload it Cards... not many chains carry them, typically home depot and a grocery store chain. HD is already hard coded, grocery chains have mostly put out memos that it is cash only, and even still... highly dependent on cashier.

Now on the flip side... if you had unlimited credit, and say 24 hours... how many thousands of dollars of visa gift cards would you be able to buy?

For me... well lets see. A conservative $3k per store, 14 hours, from 8am to 10 pm, lets take out 2 for breaks... with 20 mins between stores. So that is a conservative $9k per hour, for 12 hours, that is $108,000 in Visa Gift cards in a working day.

In reality, I am sure you can up to $5k per store, with say 15 mins between stores, you just more than doubled to $240k a day.

Fact is... you cannot find any other methods where you can buy so many "MS loading tools" anywhere else. Grocery stores, gas stations, drug stores, convenience stores, all have them and have no issues selling them. A certain chain has a store policy of no limit to how many in gift cards one can buy. Heard from a cashier someone came in to buy 40 cards in one shot. $20k.

With a team... say 5 people, you can with work, clear $100k a day in MS.

(I do realize if you live in a rural community it may be an issue, however if you are on the coasts or a major metropolitan area, PLENTY of opportunity.)

I know of a few people who publically claimed they made this full time. Based on what I do in 1 or 2 hours a day average, and what I was able to do on a full weekend day... I have zero doubts about anyone who claims they do $500k or more a month. They may be lying about personal results, however that is totally doable... even without VR, etc.

As Vol stated, VR was an EASY loading and unloading tool. It got shut down, who cares, move on. Think of this as a business, adapt or die.

With a few current promos going on, I have personally put myself in gear, and well past pace towards goals I set for April, and I think I will hit it in 2/3 the time I originally planned. This is with just me and wife helping out every so often, only a few k a week. If I bring anyone else into it... can easily make it a lot more.

I actually think the real big hitters are not on FT but rather other forums and mostly stay quiet. Just know... it is all well doable. Just learn the game from top down and new methods will come to you.

Sorry for the rant, but I hope it helps others as much as it helped me to type my thoughts out.

Not sure I see the point of this. You still split the proceeds five ways.

Correction - the big hitters are on FT, but more active in other (private) forums and mostly stay quiet on FT. Effective techniques are no longer being publically disclosed for fear of the tragedy of the town common effect. :cool:

It comes down to a few things... Mostly the fact that in a good team, 1+1=3.

All you have to do is read for examples.

Some folks cannot go to Wally every day for mo. However when you have 2 people, you can do the same thing but now be every other day. With 5.... You are there once a week... Yet still maintain the output.

It does make it easier in terms of you can break down who does what for the day.... Buy, sell or record keep or day off.

If you don't see the benefits yet, simply put you are not doing enough volume.

Lastly, not everyone on the team needs to have the same split, depending on what each brings to the table.

Some of the big hitters are out with a hernea....from carrying grocery bags full of discarded GCs to the local recycling center.

What other (private) forums are we referring to? PM thanks.

They are "private". :)

This man wins the prize for understanding the tradedy of the town (commons) effect.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time to go back to hogging Kate...

There is a point if the team was participating in an MS contest. Such contests exist (as in the one related to the recent DO in Charlotte).

I guess that depends what you think BIG is.

The future of MS is not what it used to be..

I would think BIG is in excess of a couple million points/miles a year or 25k cash back. That would likely be less than 20% of MSers. Those in that class are not blind to FT but they are not drawing circles and arrows.

Less than 2%. 90% settle for making minimum spend to get their signup bonuses. Of the rest, most can't or won't commit to what it takes to make 2+ million points a year in MS: putting a daily average of about $4K to $5K on their credit cards, and converting that merchandise to sufficient bank deposits in time to pay off their credit cards before the statements close.

Bottom line, MS is a nice side gig that works out really well when the rewards of MS are in line with your personal goals. But like most jobs, a few are amazingly good at it, and most are somewhere between mediocre and awful.

I think to MS in the 7 figures of points requires exponentially more time invested than something it the 6's. I probably MS about 10k a month more or less, spread across different category bonuses nets me about 250k or so points per year and it really involves minimal time (2-3 walmart trips per month). And I dont have any inclination to increase it above that. Not worth the diminishing returns!

The low hanging fruit is so easy I'm not sure why everyone doesn't do it to some degree really. Just using basic techniques listed in this forum you can MS $2500/month with a few clicks of a mouse every month with NO FEES. A couple more clicks and $12.50 a month nets you another $2500 which nicely balances the first $2500. After that, you start having to venture out of your house, depending on how much you can evolve.. anyways, I digress.

Revolving credit, and traditional credit card issuers in general, are absolute dinosaurs. There are plenty of startups (Lending Club, Prosper, for example) that are trying to disrupt the consumer credit space. Meetearnest.com is another newcomer offering 2 year personal loans for 6.5% APR. If you are talking about consumer credit in general, I predict there will be a new player in the market that will surprise Chase, Amex, Capital One, etc., that will totally transform the consumer credit industry that we have come to known today. Too many people are using CCs to finance purchases for 15-20% APR (at least ~50% of account holders...maybe not MSers) when fed fund rates are still around 0%...something will happen!

one fear I gots is that the day of reckoning might be coming... by that I mean if all the big spend, easy avenues / closed loops dry up -- AND min spend remains at the stubbornly high threshold that it's currently at as some sort of new normal, then lots of folks are gonna be SOL.

these days $5k, $10k even $20k is no big deal and can be done in a cpl days... but imagine having to actually put in some effort to spend $10k even in 3 months :/

Now that is what I call big. Some day I might get there.

I actually disagree.
It would be actually quite easy for Wal-Mart or other stores to stop people from being able to cash out gift cards without disrupting gift card sales or changing any laws
All they would have to do is recode the money center systems to run MO or other load transactions as cash withdrawal/advance. (Like USPS does for money orders)
Then it wouldn't really matter if the card has a pin or not

Once EMV comes around... We are all screwed.

I guess you were never a marine?

I chose the right branch, not the wrong branch. :cool:

No such thing as the wrong branch when you are serving!

I think the closest thing to the Marine's EMV was our BC3 (Basic Combat Convoy Course) at Camp Bullis.

Why do you say that? what will the inclusion of a chip have to do with anything?