News went out yesterday that as of 2/15/20, Rakuten will no longer give out the extra 3% on GCM, giftcards.com or Raise.com when using the Rakuten Visa card. I’m surprised this lasted as long as it did. I have a feeling it was AMEX who shut this down since Ebates/Rakuten was fine giving out 3% cashback for YEARS now. All of a sudden, you’re earning 4X MR (3X on the Visa and 1X on the portal,) that’s a whole lot of MR that is being transferred to AMEX.
Since this card is basically dead now, there used to be a trick to free up your CL faster. If you played this the normal way, let’s say you charge $5K on a Monday, the charge won’t post until Wednesday and even though you make a payment on Wednesday, your $5K CL won’t clear until the following week. If you knew the trick, you could make that payment on Wednesday and immediately clear your CL, thus letting you do another $5K. Thus, you could easily hit the $60K portal max a month if you had a decent CL of $5K on the Rakuten card.
Synchrony really didn’t care if you cycled your CL either. As long as you didn’t close with a negative balance, you were free to go. Sure, you got a lot of fraud alerts at the beginning, but once you trained the card, you were good to go. The biggest bottleneck was Rakuten not liking that type of volume. I know some people’s accounts were suspended, but Rakuten did let most back in. I tried my best not to hit it THAT hard (mainly due to liquidation issues,) but it was very tempting to go nuts on the card.
This sucks and will definitely make Necker a lot tougher to get to.
