I just recently learned that Ibotta will give you cashack on in store purchases of certain items. For instance, Coke came out with their new shitty flavor Dreamworld. Ibotta will give you like $.50 back for every 20 oz bottle you buy up to 5 (store cost is like $1.50 – $2.) And all you have to do is scan the receipt and that’s it. Pretty painless. The only issue is that once you redeem it, the offer MAY OR MAY NOT COME BACK AGAIN. I’m sure the manuf decides if they want to let users do the same promo over and over.
Well, I had told a couple of friends about this, who used my referral code. I then decide to scale up Ibotta accounts (really thinking that they DGAF cuz I’m sure they get paid per redemption too.) I guess I was reckless in that I referred myself…a few times. And I wasn’t doing it for the referral bonuses; I was doing it to scale up the grocery redemptions. Anyhow, a week or two later, I cashed out my main account via ACH. I then cashed out one of my child accounts with ACH (diff bank.) A couple of days later, my child account gets “temporarily locked” and flagged for review. A day later, I see that the ACH is complete. Then a day after that, all of my accounts got axed.
Even my 2 friends got the axe. One of them didn’t even use the account, so they just went by referral code used. Maybe it was all the referrals in the short time period or maybe they looked at my child account IP and matched it with my main account. Regardless, all of them are gone. And you can’t even create a new account on the same device ID either. Had to spin up a new account on a new device (oddly, same IP works fine.) I haven’t tried to cash out yet; I’m going to let the account marinate for a while. Lesson learned – don’t try to abuse Ibotta’s referral system
“I guess I was reckless in that I referred myself…a few times.” No, you were abusive at best, fraud at worse. I applaud Ibotta for their efforts. Abuses, like this and others, is likely why they no longer have the 2% kick-back from OfficeDepot purchases.
Waaahhh waaaaah waaaaah, you’re at the wrong blog then Doug. Feel free to block me and never read anything here again.
Ibotta is very strict on the rule that you can only have one account per device. They don’t really care how many accounts you have, but just only log in to one account per device. They actually spell this out pretty explicitly in their help forums because people will use one device for, say, hubby and wife and that isn’t allowed.
Thats what I did though. 1 device per account. Never logged into another account.. oh you know what – the account that got limited was an OLD account i created a looong time ago for my mom. Maybe when I logged into the new device they got me? That’s odd though because they can’t expect old accounts to still use an old device that’s long gone…
Hmm, not sure. I think it’s fine if you use the same account on a new device (like when you upgrade phones) because you still haven’t violated the rule to only use one account on a single device. So maybe that wasn’t what caused issues for you and it was the referral abuse. I have self referred but done it at a much slower pace. Every time I get a new device, I just use it as an opportunity to set up a new Ibotta account (and I self refer).
There is also a separate rule where you can’t cash out too quickly on a new account (maybe a few days) but it seems like you were actually pretty careful about that. I typically cash out via Amazon even though it’s a little more of a pain just so that I don’t have to worry about finding a new bank account to cash out (in case they match accounts by bank account).