Manufactured spending

Piro21 wrote: ↑ How is this a problem? They're still collecting their merchant fees on every transaction. Their rewards programs are working as intended.

hugh_da_man wrote: ↑ The only person who loses is the tax payer.

Piro21 wrote: ↑ But they'd lose anyway if those coins were bought by people who actually wanted to collect them instead of using them as currency. The government factored that in when they decided to allow them to be bought by credit card transactions.

Piro21 wrote: ↑ But they'd lose anyway if those coins were bought by people who actually wanted to collect them instead of using them as currency. The government factored that in when they decided to allow them to be bought by credit card transactions.

Stock R wrote: ↑ No, because the government would've actually sold the coins. Now they've paid the fees and got stuck back with the original product.

hugh_da_man wrote: ↑ The only person who loses is the tax payer.

eldeejay wrote: ↑ moron should have hung on to the coins and sold them on ebay, not return for face value.
anyway, this was no secret, myself and my colleagues milked this one hard when it started. i used cashback cards to buy. some took it further than others. this guy was lucky to have proximity to a mint store. I think I may have even learned about it on RFD. definitely worth a student's time.

Mike15 wrote: ↑ I doubt there's enough suckers on eBay to buy a 1/4 oz silver coin for $20 after eBay/PayPal fees. Or are there? The metal's only worth a quarter of that, and the mintages were hundreds of thousands.

notfromqc wrote: ↑ ... more importantly, can it still be done?

JackWhyte wrote: ↑ this is hardly a smart or innovative way to create CC points, and there are tons of ways to launder credit card purchases, it just comes down to whether you're unethical enough to drag your soul through the muck and then come out the other side.

The guy in the story is a lawyer, so he definitely qualifies.

Dreamrider wrote: ↑ Please enlighten us.
What can you buy with CC and get equal value back in cash?

notfromqc wrote: ↑ ... more importantly, can it still be done?

JackWhyte wrote: ↑ Seriously? What rock did you just roll out of.

Here's a low-hanging fruit, and far from the most lucrative, but just another cog in the CC scamming machine: bonus points offers on gift cards, pre-paid cards or other cash equivalents you shop at every day/week anyway. sometimes you can even pay off your CC bill with them, and the points increase can be 10-20-30% depending on the deal.

buying coins in bulk at the mint is obviously the simplest method, as any monkey could do that with enough free time and effort, but my point is that this crap has been going on for years and it's hardly anything innovative.