MG49

I got curious and looked myself. Every Shell gas card is listed for above face value. There are even BP and Sunoco gas cards listed above face value. Not sure if anyone actually buys them, but with as many listings as there are, I would assume someone is buying them. I'm curious if anyone has any insight to this.

V6Jeep4x4

I've always been curious about this. When someone bids over value for a gift card, I just assumed it was some sort of a scam. Such as buying and claiming that you never received and getting refunded? Or, perhaps, using a stolen credit card?

That doesn't explain why they would be listed above face value in the first place though. You'd be inviting yourself into this.

I don't use Ebay too often but when I did, I remember seeing coupons/rebates for say, 20% of your next purchase. With something like that, I guess you could pay $225 for a $200 gift card and come out ahead but I'm not even sure Ebay does stuff like that anymore.

Weird.

spidy1

Most of them buyers try to scam the seller. And another use is probably here.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/bu...sh-value-cards

http://www2.readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=119519

spidy1

WM cashier refused to sell me GC's when i pulled out my CC to pay for it.

Earlier during the day for trial purposed i bought 1 & had no problems with another cashier.

Maybe because i pulled out 4 GC's to purchase she told me that WM has a policy that the V/MC/Amex GC's can be purchased only with Debit/Cash.

MG49

It'll usually depend on each individual cashier and different WM's will have different results. Just try again with a different cashier or different WM, but try just one GC at a time. Multiple GCs look suspicious sometimes.

BeyondtheWrap

I would have assumed it's because eBay/Paypal fees take such a large percentage of the seller's revenue.

sungchiahao

Hi All,
I'm located in Phoenix, AZ. Called up local Target and they do not carry the REDcard. My next option would be the Bluebird. However, it doesn't allow credit card loading. How do I go about trying to effectively charge the mortgage and utilities on my credit card to meet the min spending?

Mamibear

IIRC, there is an ongoing promo where the BB starter kit has zero fee. Check your WM for one of those and buy one to load with amount of your choice. Then register online to get the permanent card later. You can load this card up to $5K per calendar month by buying the Sunrise Visa GCs. Once you've loaded funds, you can do BillPay to pay your mortgage and utilities.

Look for them in stand alone shelves that says FINANCIAL. Buy the ones with 4.94 fee, be careful NOT to buy any of the vanilla VGCs, they can only be loaded 49.99 or less at a time while the Sunrise VGCs can be loaded at $500 a time via Kate, MoneyCenter or regular registers. Good luck!

sungchiahao

Thanks a lot. I will look at the visa cards

Edit: I can't find a Visa GC called Sunrise. Is that a bank or a credit union?

Bluebirdie

The VGC are not called Sunrise. They have paper casing showing pictures of happy birthday, etc. If you flip the gift card package and read the back, the bottom fine prints says Sunrise bank.

I also checked these out at our local Walmart this week. Like the previous poster experienced, our local Walmart said Debit and Cash only.

zainman

What is the best way to MS when not being stateside? I have US credit cards, SSN, postal address etc but live outside of the US. Is there an MS opportunity that is completely online? For e.g. buying electronic gift cards and then selling them electronically as well?

mulliganman30

Complete newbie to this. I have several questions I am hoping someone can answer.

First off, what are the most important acronyms and what they mean including VR and WM load? The acronyms can make it kind of difficult to understand everything.

2. Are there any certain gift cards that work best for getting money orders (if I want to pay for my mortgage and sales tax/licensing on a new vehicle I just purchased)? Can Serve/Bluebird/Redcard with enough funds for the money order amount be used to directly purchase the money order (instead of using any said give cards above)?

3. Does loading Serve/Bluebird/Redbird from credit card result in a cash advance fee on the credit card? The card I might start trying this with in the beginning is a Chase Sapphire Preferred card that has a $4,000 3 month minimum spending requirement to be met.

4. Can Serve load via credit card only now happen by using an American Express credit card?

5. Can you use Bill Pay to pay other credit card bills with Serve/Bluebird/Redbird if there are funds in the account to cover it? How do you select the correct Chase/Amex, etc. bill to pay when using Serve/Bluebird/Redbird Bill Pay option?

6. Is there a way to get a Redbird card if you have no friends/family in areas where they are being sold (I'm in southwest Missouri)?

7. Is regular card needed to start loading, getting money orders, Bill Pay, etc. for Bluebird/Redbird/Serve? In other words can you use your temporary card for that until the permanent one arrives?

Whew! Sorry for so many questions but I have read this thread and taken notes a couple of times but still a bit confused.

mulliganman30

Forgot one: Does loading from a gift card have to occur in a Target or Walmart for Bluebird and Redbird? In other words, no online loading using that method?

Mirnada

First off, Welcome!

1) I noticed many of the same things. After a while, you get used to the acronyms, and they become second nature. There's a general Flyertalk glossary, linked to at the footer in each page, but it's more FT (Flyertalk) generic, and not MS (Manufactured Spending) -specific, and so is generally unhelpful. I emailed the curators several times to have it updated to add things like WM and VR and such, but they never responded/acted (and probably rightly so; our little MS sub-forum is pretty niche, it seems, to the intent of the site at large). So anyway, just keep plugging along, and you'll notice someone using the non-acronym version, and then you'll know it. For now: VR = Vanilla Reload, WM = WalMart.

2) Yes, I think so? VR seems to be discouraged. Sunrise Bank (I think?) gift cards seem to be generally accepted? As for the meat of your question, using Serve/BB/RC to purchase a money order, I don't know, but most people would ask "Why would you want to do that in the first place? Once you've got the money on your Serve/BB/RC account, you can use it to pay off a credit card using bill pay, so there's no point in trying to do a money order." But maybe someone else could actually answer your question, because I don't know.

3) It generally depends on the card, and the disclaimer everyone likes to throw around when offering their advice/experience with a specific card is, YMMV. In general, I believe that for Redcard, there are not cash advance fees? For Serve, there can be; read the wiki at the top of that thread for good info about which cards incur them, and which do not.

4) That policy is supposed to take effect in the middle of this month (April 2015), and so you've got a couple more weeks before that's true. But yes, it is supposed to be the case soon. Thus, your hope to meet your minimum spend on your CSP may be limited through this particular avenue.

5) Yes. In general, the process is you direct the billpay to the bank of the card issuer (e.g. Chase, or American Express), and then input the card number whose bill you're trying to pay, because that is the same thing as the "Account Number" that is having the money sent to it.

6) Yes. There are online avenues you can use to purchase one. YMMV! A lot of people apparently do this; personally I'm not interested in buying a temporary card from an online source/vendor. It's up to each person's own personal risk tolerance.

7) Not sure.

In general, if you've only just read this thread, good job! But there's still a ton of reading you have to do. Read the wikis on other threads, read the threads themselves (ok, I know that's probably unrealistic, especially for something like the RedCard thread, which has 4400 posts already this year), or at least read the last 10-20 pages of posts in those most-active threads. The research has just begun, and a lot of your questions would be answered by doing more reading. But, scolding aside, seriously: welcome, and good luck!

(Replying to your follow-up question in your follow-up post: There may be one or two other places one can load a gift card aside from Target and WalMart [FD], but in general, yes -- online loading using that method will get your accounts shut down right quick, or so I've heard.)

Mamibear

answer to #7 Yes, B/P functionality is only for registered cards.