I had known about this deal for a while now, but a buddy reminded me of it yesterday. With all the stores around me now only accepting debit cards with names on them, that means it’s harder to liquidate those prepaid debit cards. So this will be a good backup option for that. Also, I haven’t been utilizing the ‘debit card online’ feature of Serve ever since Paypal sent out those warning emails. I figure I can use this card for that so I can at least get some miles for free.
The gist is that you get 0.5 AA miles per $1 debit card transaction. So if you buy a $1,000 money order at Walmart for $.70, you’ll get 500 miles for $.70. That costs you $.0014, which is a very cheap way to earn AA miles. Also, you can get a bonus 1,000 miles if you direct deposit $1,000 into your checking account, which I will do. It looks like the max is 120,000 miles per year, so that would be $240,000 worth of transactions. They also limit you to $1,500 per Visa debit card transaction; I don’t know if that’s per swipe or per day, so will have to play around with it.
The signup took about 5 minutes. Their web site is pretty thorough. You’ll need your driver’s license. I chose not to use a credit card to fund the $100 initial deposit since I didn’t want to take the risk of being charged a cash advance fee. I tried a prepaid Staples $200 VGC to fund, and that got rejected. Instead, I chose to fund with my BECU account, which their system was able to auto verify me with my login info (I thought that was pretty advanced for this bank).
I think the game plan here is to buy money orders from Walmart, deposit money orders into my local bank or do a mobile deposit back into the UFB account. I need to do research on shutdowns from them if you scale up too much. If anyone knows, let me know.
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