Purchasing Visa gift cards and then liquidating them to cash is a classic manufactured spending play. In this article, we’ll share several little known tips and tricks to help you make the most of your time when doing this play.
Buying and liquidating gift cards has been a primary method for manufactured spending for years, and we regularly see reports of people manufacturing well over $10,000 per month in spending using this technique.
Why would I want to buy Visa gift cards?
These gift cards are often sold in supermarkets, office supply stores, gas stations, and drugstores, all of which often get higher points bonuses for credit cards. For example, my Amex Gold card currently offers a 9X promotion on up to $25,000 spent at supermarkets, so I have been using this method to complete that play.
Additionally, the purchases of these gift cards are usually easy to scale up to large transaction volumes, which makes this an appealing method. Many of these stores allow gift-cards to be bought in the self-checkout lanes, which reduces any risk that might come from getting asked questions by the people working there.
Unfortunately, these gift cards usually come with a fee, typically in the 1-2% range. However, most rewards plays will well outweigh these fees.
What do I do once I’ve bought them?
While you can always use the gift cards for your organic spending (groceries, dining, etc), we generally prefer to convert them to cash, in order to pay off our original credit card statement. This process is called liquidation, and we have several liquidation techniques shared on our manufactured spending methods page.
Tips around purchasing gift cards
One important suggestion is to make sure to include other purchases besides your gift cards in your transaction. This can be as simple as a one dollar pack of gum.
If you have multiple transactions that are just multiples of $500 or $505 (card w/ fee), this can be flagged as manufactured spending by your credit card company. In fact, in June 2023, Amex took away points from many in the MS community for doing exactly this at grocery stores.
Another suggestion is to watch out for whether your store shares Level 3 (L3) data with your credit card company. These levels indicate how much information about your transaction is shared with the credit card company. L3 data includes the most amount of information, including itemized data about exactly what you purchased. If the store shares L3 data, your credit card company will be able to easily determine that you have been purchasing gift cards.
Whether a store shares L3 data may be different for Visa and Amex transactions. For Amex transactions, you can look at your statement history on the web (not mobile) Amex website to see if they include an itemized list of what you purchased. If not, then no L3 data has been shared. Thus, we suggest starting by making a small purchase at the retailer to determine if they share L3 data, and only scale up if they do not.
How can I scale up the purchase of these cards?
Scaling purchases typically depends on the store you are buying gift cards at. We’ll expand this list over time.
Kroger
Kroger is a retail company that opens a bunch of grocery chains across the United States. Their grocery chains include: Dillons, Fred Meyer, Fry's Harris Teeter, Home Chef, King Scoopers, Kroger, Mariano's, QFC, Ralphs, Roundy's, Smith's.
As with anything else, your personal experience may differ from ours, but we have seen that you can use their self-checkout machines to buy up to $1,500 in gift cards in a single transaction without getting flagged to show your ID. To scale up further than $1,500 in a single trip, we have had success making several separate purchases back-to-back (Usually around 3) at the self-checkout machine.
Additionally, Kroger sells US Bank-issued Visa gift cards, which are the easiest to liquidate.
Which cards should I get?
Not all Visa gift cards are equal. While most of them are generally equivalent in the ease by which you can acquire them, the liquidation methods that work for each may be different. We provide this information on our liquidation posts.
Visa gift cards are distinguished by their issuer. Some common issuers include Sutton Bank, US Bank, Blackhawk, Metabank, and Incomm.
While most cards have some liquidation methods that work and some that don’t, US Bank based gift cards have proven to be the most resilient. Currently, all liquidation methods work with this card, so aim for these where possible.
