DEAL DEAD – Binji

Back in May 2019, a new ‘all in one’ debit card came out. Doc wrote about it in a blog post here. The majority of the comments balked at the $89 signup fee as well as many other red flags. Go ahead and read the top 10 comments or so and then come back.

Anyway, a few risk-taking readers decided to try it out anyway. The card took about a week to arrive and immediately they found out that a) you could load the card with a VGC and b) it had a bank account number and routing number to let you pay your credit card.

Sure enough, we all crowdsourced which VGCs worked (Metabank VGC worked but not Metabank MGC, gccom’s egc worked, 5Backs worked, etc.) You could load something like 5 times per day OR $5K. I want to say it worked for about a month before they caught on. The weird thing was they had a 1 day sale where the card was something like $10. They had buy one, get one promos. Basically trying to sell as many cards as possible and make money that way. They never thought about the daily costs of all those debit loads to their account and people paying their credit cards (instead of using their stupid Binji cards to earn them swipe fees.)

By late June, they blocked VGC loads and then basically called us all criminals. I think there was about 2-3 days where they opened the floodgates, got bombarded with loads and immediately turned off loads. Then we all got upset and tried to return the cards and/or started to chargeback for the cost of the cards. Eventually they decided to just refund everyone for the cards (but if you had a chargeback, you had to cancel it.) It was a shitshow.

Last I heard, they were still blocking loads. Their website right now says ‘join the waitlist.’ I have a feeling they’re just going to close up shop. If they do re-launch, I can’t see them not fixing the VGC loads or whatnot. It was a good run. RIP Binji.

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