Well folks, it seems Tio has been shut down for good according to their web site:
Update: March 22, 2018 @ 4:00pm ET
TIO Networks Provides Second Update on Suspension of Operations
After careful consideration, PayPal has decided to not restore TIO’s services and will wind down TIO’s business accordingly. We thank you for your patience as we made this difficult decision. We apologize for the inconvenience the discontinuation of services has caused our billing partners, retailers, agents, and their customers – and we appreciate your partnership and support for the past 20 years.
As previously announced, the PayPal platform is not impacted in any way and PayPal’s customers’ data remains secure. PayPal remains committed to our mission to democratize financial services and provide secure, convenient and affordable ways to move and manage money to those who are underserved by the financial system.
MS-ing with TIO
Some of you may be wondering what Tio is; it was one of the not-so-secret pajama MS methods that was talked about hush-hush. You could liquidate almost any debit card for a 1.7% fee. Sure, some of you penny pinchers may think that’s a high fee, but this was a volume play, not a margin play. See, if you emailed them, they would allow you to send over $10K per day (maybe even higher than that; I’ve forgotten already.) This was great for people who didn’t have a friendly Walmart or USPS. Even if you were doing grocery MS, if you had spare credit line on say your SPG Business card, you could just use that to buy giftcards.com egcs and then run those egcs through on TIO, thus paying 1.7c per SPG, which is much better than buying direct from SPG. Even better – you could do it from your pajamas. I hope it was worth the $233M for Paypal to crush their competition.
1.7% is a little rough. $16 more than an MO. But ya some people hate Wally or vice versa.
It really wasn’t rough at all, considering you could literally sit at home in your pajamas and never have to set foot in a Walmart or USPS or anywhere of that nature. If you were making 3% (Discover or Alliant) or 2.63% cash back, or manufacturing SPG points, this really added up with volume. You could easily do over $100,000 per month. RIP.
You can also do $100k a month at Walmart/could at USPS and save 1.6%
Yeah, you COULD, if you have an extremely friendly Walmart/USPS and you don’t mind drawing massive attention to yourself and you don’t mind treating it like a part time job. Or you could simply spend a few minutes each day doing it from home in front of your computer, accept the lower margins, but have MUCH MORE FREE TIME!
Sure. Time is money and everyone values it differently.
You can’t think about it that way. You have to think about it like – “I have a spare 2% card that I’m not using at all. If I run $50K a week through it, I’m making $150 a week in my pajamas for little effort.”
I don’t think either way is right or wrong. Hypothetically if I am running $1M a month and was/am able to do it all at Walmart/USPS/etc then Tio would be a huge cost for me and wouldn’t make sense. BUT if I had a DM, DC, etc that I wasn’t maxing/cycling to a point where I felt comfortable then yes it would’ve made sense to do Tio.
Right. This play only works when you have excess capacity that you can’t do in person.