The Story of Vanilla Reloads and how They Paid Thousands In Credit Card Rewards

Back in the day, probably around 2011, I had a deep addiction to “churning.” It was something I would do each day, either at lunch or on the way home, or sometimes both. I craved it, needed it, yearned for it. The idea of free money for minimal effort was an idea that would not leave my mind.

How Vanilla Reloads Worked

American Express was trying to appeal to the unbanked by creating a product called a “Bluebird.” Bluebird was a hybrid account that provided a debit card with a pin to make purchases. You could “reload” your Bluebird account in several ways, one of which was by using this reload card below. You could load up to $500 per card, and it cost 3.95 additional per reload card. At the time, the monthly load limit was 10k, and I graciously signed up my wife, so that gave us 20k of buying power each month. My trusty Amex Blue Cash credit card got 5% back at drugstores, so that meant an easy $25 in rewards for each card that I bought. Then I would use the Bluebird card to purchase money orders at the local grocery store, deposit them in my checking account and then pay off my Amex Blue Cash card. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. An easy $800 a month.

1. Buy the reload for 500, buy two, total always came to $1007.90 with the 3.95 fee on each card.
2. Use the Bluebird website to “add” the 500 from each card to your Bluebird card.
3. Go to Kroger or another fine grocery store and purchase a money order for 999.31, which then had a .69 fee for the money order bringing the total to $1000. Use the Bluebird card to buy.
4. Deposit the money order to yourself using your favorite mobile deposit banking app
5. Pay down the credit card with money in your checking account.
6. Profit!

An Interesting Problem

After about a year of steady churn, the bloggers figured this out and taught everybody how to do it. Catastrophe. See Tragedy of the Commons. Quickly vanilla reload cards across the country started to disappear because of the increased popularity. The issue was that you could only buy two a day max per CVS rules, so that meant 20 trips total (2 cards per day, 40 cards), but often I would go to CVS, and they would be empty! At least on the surface, they appeared to be gone. People were starting to hide these cards behind other gift cards on the rack. Some would even go to lengths of STEALING a stack of cards and then each day bringing in 2 cards from home to pay for them and activate. I never went that far. They reasoned that the cards never had value until they were activated — crazy talk, I didn’t want to be arrested for shoplifting.

A Specific “Vanilla” Encounter

Near the end of this fabulous run with Bluebird, the Vanilla cards were becoming harder and harder to find. Too many people had got into the game. One particular Saturday, while I was out running errands, I ran into CVS with my seven-year-old son to quickly check to see if they had any Vanilla cards come in. Sure enough, there was a fresh stash of about 30 cards. I took two and went to purchase. I was on a first-name basis with all the cashiers, and we quickly completed the transaction after the usual pleasantries.

However,  during that time, a young guy hurried into the store, and he looked very, very nervous and apprehensive.  I watched him storm to the gift card “altar” in the middle of the store and start to rummage on his knees doing something weird. I made my 7-year-old go over there and snoop on him. Bingo, he was going for the vanilla cards. He brought a few up to the register and paid for them, and then promptly left. My son and I quickly went back to see what he did with the cards. They were missing, nowhere to be found! My son instinctively got on his knees and shoved his small arm under the gift card rack, and came out with the goldmine of vanilla cards. That joker had hidden them under the shelf! Loser.

Well, I went to the front and grabbed a scratch piece of paper from my CVS employee friend, Anne, and a spare pen. I decided to craft this guy a little note. It read:

“Sorry, dude, you’ll have to find a better place to hide your stash!”  – A fellow Vanilla addict.

Then I let my son carefully place the note back where he found the vanilla reloadables right under the rack hidden from view. He then decided where we needed to relocate these cards for safekeeping since we had a competition that we had to squash. He chose the other side of the store behind the blank VHS tapes. LOL. IT was the perfect location as CVS wouldn’t be movin’ a lot of those tapes anytime soon. Heck, I was surprised they even had them at all! Sure enough, I was able to liquify the rest of that pile for the rest of the month.

The End of an Era

Shortly after this experience, the game was busted anyway, but it was a great run! Bluebird lowered the monthly reload limit to something stupid, and CVS started getting weird about using credit cards to purchase the reloadables. It was time to find a new churn.

This display is what the racks often looked like near the end. Such gift card churn carnage!