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Comment by _ykfk | Hacker News Reader

What implications does this have on churning?

Probably none, given this complaint is focused on money services Walmart provides.

Walmart Money Center has been a pretty large component of "manufactured spending" which is not the same thing as churning but churning is often used as an umbrella term for all point earning hacks activities.

Yeah, it would be hard for churning/MS to exist without Walmart. You can buy Visa/MC gift cards with a credit card, turn them into money orders at Walmart (via running them as "debit"), and deposit those into most banks at a ~1% total loss.

These days, I think Walmart is not the easiest route to liquidate gift cards though. They used to allow some silly things like combining many gift cards to buy one money order, but are at least supposed to restrict it now.

Is manufactured spending legal? It sounds like abusing an electronic and wire system.

Sounds like you are alluding to wire fraud, but you would be doing something wrong if you are defrauding anyone. You are just sending money to yourself, via a fairly high-surveillance method (Walmart will check your ID, you have to deposit it into a real bank account, etc).

Yes, at least in the US. CC merchants are constantly fighting this behavior and limiting what counts for the purpose of the reward via their Ts&Cs.

(I have not passed the bar, this is not formal legal advice)

You can't do that kind of shit at retailers anymore.

You can definitely still do it. I would say it is a bit less popular now though as the pandemic slowed travel, and credit card issuers have gotten used to churning and managing breakage/risks.

Chase still offers big incentives on office supply stores, so that's probably the main driver of MS right now aside from sign-up bonuses. Staples quite frequently offers $0 fees on their gift cards to encourage this.

You definitely can. I used to say "maybe not in the sfbay area" where all of the opportunities have been mined, but, no, there are still opportunities for MS even there. Outside of sfbay the sky's the limit.

What is churning in this context?

Credit card rewards churning probably. Basically finding cards with either attractive starting offers or ongoing rewards and then generating cash flow through them that is recurring. One example was the mint at one point was selling some coin online with free shipping, after receiving the coins you'd just deposit them into your account for zero loss. It looked like a normal purchase to the CC so you got the full points for it.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/credit-cards/credit-card-...

https://viewfromthewing.com/free-miles-for-churning-presiden...

> One example was the mint at one point was selling some coin online with free shipping, after receiving the coins you'd just deposit them into your account for zero loss. It looked like a normal purchase to the CC so you got the full points for it.

Presumably the mint was eating the credit card fees on this, so effectively it was a transfer of money from the government to the churner, with the credit card company keeping some amount on the way.

The mint actually wanted to get rid of the dollar coins that they were accumulating storage fees on. Congress decided to make the mint mint way too many dollar coins (and prohibited it from advertising) and nobody wanted them. Once people ordered and deposited them they'd make their way to the Federal Reserve and were no longer the mint's problem.

So yes, a transfer of money from the government to the purchaser, but with a lot more steps.

Don't forget the free shipping. The USPS probably got paid by the mint.

Taking unusual actions to harvest credit card rewards.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/credit-cards/credit-card-...

nothing.. they are not the same thing

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