A chase with chase

I'm amazed that Amazon is still selling .15 gift cards, and disappointed in all the FWers for not abusing this to the extreme yet.

I'll leave some notes about my rate of transactions to help people determine what transactions/day they want to go with.

Fraud alerts are pattern based (yes this is an over simplification)
Start low and work your way up gradually, adding 1-5 transactions a day and maintaining the same level for several days.
Or hit it extremely hard the day before your statement closes and watch your account online for your rewards points to post.
if your statement closes on a sunday, you have all of saturday to go for it. I think the management types who can close accounts are less likely to be there on a weekend.

My personal use pattern:
First month, all penny items:
100 - 200 per day, never recieved a fraud alert
Stopped half way through the month for fear of losing what I was going to get in rewards

Second month, all .15 items and a few .01 items
~10 penny items per day for couple weeks (just for the hell of it)
100-200 .15 items per day for hte last 2 weeks of my statement cycle
For the last 3 days of my statement cycle did 1000-2000 .15 transactions a day.

Third month, all .15 items
Did 400-500 .15 transactions a day for ~2 weeks.
Account closed in middle of the month

Left checking account opened and payed the balance after the closure. Received rewards when statement posted.

Edit: On a fun side note, once you get enough transactions in the statement cycle the "Recent Transactions" page fails to load.

DaveHanson said:   Thanks gizmoduck, but my general point remains the same. 15 cent GCs would cost Amazon maybe 35-55 cents each.

Having them deny one cent purchases is no big deal, but their importance means avoiding a blanket ban from them should have nontrivial value.How is that law degree paying off for you?

DaveHanson said:   Crazytree said:   How is that law degree paying off for you?
Eh? OT aside, I'm missing the reference/joke. My degree is in philosophy...I must have (unusually) mis-recalled a posting where you said you were planning on going to law school a few years back. Must have been another poster. Hmm.

To redeem gift cards took a script, to purchase gift cards you can use a firefox plugin that will record your actions and replay them.
You could probably figure out how to redeem gift cards with similar macro recorders as well.

I wrote the script in about 30 minutes.

The people who took advantage of the penny gift cards probably used similar macro recorders. Since there is no need to redeem giftcards when you get 1000% back.