Breaking: internet censorship, or, is Capital One history's greatest monster?

How low can you go? Try Capital One, whose agents allegedly sent a letter to Personal Finance Digest's hosting provider telling them to remove his site from the internet.

It's unclear from PFD's post whether the letter was a "takedown notice" within the meaning of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the abuse of which is a violation of federal law ("Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—(1) that material or activity is infringing...shall be liable for any damages...incurred by the alleged infringer...who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation..."), or merely a threatening letter. However, based on the agent's admission — in writing! — that:

The website in discussion did not host, nor hosting [sic] fraudulent content against Capital One.

It seems to me that PFD has an airtight defamation case at least against the "RSA Anti-Fraud Command Centre," whatever that is, and Capital One if RSA was actually acting as their agent in this case.

I don't have any Capital One cards, but if I did I'd shut them immediately and tell the CSR why I was doing so. In the meantime, I'm removing all links to Capital One from my permanent pages until I see an explanation for this abhorrent behavior. It's not much, but it's what I can do to show solidarity with PDF on my little corner of the web.

Read Personal Finance Digest's post for all the gruesome details.

Update: no PayPal cash back for Evolve Money payments

[update 2/6/14: please see my post on Upromise Investments]

While investigating Evolve Money, one of the most lucrative possibilities I considered was that payments made using PayPal Business Debit MasterCards would earn 1% cash back. As I wrote in my initial story:

"I can confirm that the PayPal Business Debit MasterCard does work for bill payments, and these transactions are processed as signature purchases which should earn 1% cash back. My regular readers know what that means: you can load your PayPal account using PayPal My Cash cards purchased with a rewards-earning credit card, then earn 1% cash back liquidating those funds paying bills you wouldn't ordinarily be able to pay with a credit card. You'll be earning your credit card rewards – and a small profit – for transactions that wouldn't otherwise earn rewards."

Unfortunately, despite the fact that the payments are processed as signature transactions — and even have the "$" symbol next to them in my transaction history (only visible using the "old" PayPal layout) — when my cash back for January posted today I did not earn 1% cash back on Evolve Money payments. This is still a great, free way to get money out of your PayPal account, but the cash back angle did not work out. In fact on my Business Debit Card summary page, the Evolve transactions are simply not included as either "eligible" or "ineligible" transactions; the totals shown represent all my purchases using the card except those.

This doesn't bode particularly well for payments made using other rewards debit cards, although that also may vary on a case-by-case basis. If you've experimented with other rewards debit cards, leave your results in the comments.

Update: TD Go transaction limits

On January 22 I reported that a Flyertalk member had shared a new Visa Buxx card that was superior to the existing Nationwide and US Bank versions. After patiently waiting for my card to arrive, on the 29th I made a horrible realization: the card has an unpublished transaction limit. As I wrote last week,

"The reason to tentatively suspect that it's a 7-day rolling limit is that is the time period for the Nationwide Visa Buxx's $800 transaction limit.

The worst case scenario is that the limit is enforced over a 30-day rolling period, in which case this card is functionally only good for $2,000 in cheap manufactured spend per month, rather than $3,000."

Now that I've had the card for 8 days, I'm pleased to be report that the rolling, $2,000 limit is over 7-days. That means it's possible to manufacture the full $3,000 load limit each month.

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Announcement: the 529 Reference Project

[update 2/6/14: please see my post on Upromise Investments]

I'm very excited to announce that I'm going to be trying something brand new here on the site. After I wrote up the 3 craziest ways to manufacture spend using Evolve Money, I received a lot of feedback, and the most promising of the 3 methods seems to be the third: making contributions to a 529 college savings plan, then withdrawing the contribution to your bank account. The problem is that 529 college savings plans are sponsored by the states, and there are a lot of states. Each plan is slightly different, and it would be simply overwhelming for me to attempt to catalog all 50+ plans.

That's where you come in. I have readers all over the country, some of whom have children, some of whom are using their state's 529 plan to save for their children's education. That means they have information that other readers can use!

If you look up in the top right corner on any page of the website, you'll see a new tab: the 529 Reference Project. There will only ever be one post there, the Master List of State-Sponsored 529 College Savings Plans. In that post, you will always be able to find all the information submitted so far about each state's 529 plan.

Even more importantly, in the comments to that post you can leave information about any plan you have information about. Among other things, you can leave the following information:

• Is the plan listed as a payee in Evolve Money?
• Does the plan allow non-qualified withdrawals to be made directly to a bank account?

I've added the relevant information for three plans already; the rest are up to you. So be a part of something great: leave the information for your state in the comments to that post.

Update: PayPal Prepaid Debit (Netspend) shutdowns

Back in December I wrote up two similar products that have a (well-deserved) bad reputation in the travel hacking community: the netSpend Visa and PayPal Prepaid MasterCard. The cards function almost identically, with a few minor differences:

• The underwriting bank is different, and consequently the PayPal Prepaid MasterCard can't be added as a funding account to some banks;
• The PayPal MasterCard costs $4.95 per month, and has the other features of a "premium" netSpend account.

Those differences are trivial since your account will be shut down within a month. The reason these cards are interesting is that they're Vanilla-reloadable, using Vanilla Reload Network reload cards, and they allow ACH "pulls:" transactions initiated on another bank's website.

Shutdown Update

As I wrote in my original post,

while reader Tim reported that his netSpend and PayPal Prepaid MasterCard accounts were shut down simultaneously, that wasn't my experience: I haven't loaded or unloaded anything to my PayPal Prepaid MasterCard account, and it's still open, while my netSpend account was shut down a few days after finishing my first month's $5,000 in loads.

Once my netSpend loads rolled off my 30-day history, I loaded another $5,000 to the PayPal Prepaid MasterCard and used ACH pulls to withdraw the money. But my account remained open, giving me the faintest of hopes that I'd be able to use the card for an additional $5,000 per month in manufactured spend in perpetuity.

Then they closed my account.

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When it comes to these abusive corporations, a lot of people will tell you to just stay away. My advice is a little more nuanced:

• Know what to expect. You will be shutdown within a month;
• Protect yourself. Withdraw money immediately;
• Most importantly, don't use money you can't afford to be without for up to a month.

When you follow those three rules, there's no reason to think of netSpend as the "enemy" or worry about them "catching" you: they offer a product that allows you to manufacture $5,000 in spend, one time. Whether that product interests you isn't a moral judgment, it's a practical judgment.

Choose wisely!

Alert: JH Preferred limitations and shutdown reports

If you read some of the same blogs I do, you may have noticed a deafening silence here about one new product: the JH Preferred card. That's for a simple reason: while I never hesitate to admit when I make an error, that doesn't mean I'm eager to make as many as possible. 

I first read about the card over at Personal Finance Digest, a truly interesting blog I mentioned just the other day. Having just broken the story of HR Block Emerald prepaid cards finally being Vanilla-reloadable, naturally I was excited to see one of their competitors come out with a similar card that explicitly advertises its compatibility with Vanilla Reload Network reload cards, and has routing and account numbers like the Emerald card.

JH Preferred Does Not Allow ACH Pulls

Ready for this? I'm going to reveal one of my absolute favorite tricks. It's not a secret, it's not a hack, it's just one of my favorite tools in my box: if you have a Fidelity Investment Rewards credit card (2% cash back American Express or 1.5% cash back Visa), you can easily verify whether any product does or does not allow ACH pulls by adding that account in your credit card's online bill payment tab. Fidelity will send out two test deposits — then it will attempt to withdraw them. If the withdrawal isn't allowed, you'll be notified like so:

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I do this 5-10 times per month to verify whether various products allow ACH pulls. It isn't fool-proof: while the Netspend Prepaid Visa and the PayPal Prepaid MasterCard both allow ACH pulls, the PayPal account's routing number isn't recognized by Fidelity, so you can't test for ACH-compatibility. But it costs nothing, so it's a great place to start.

JH Preferred Shutdown Reports

As I spent the week patiently waiting for my card to arrive, reports were already trickling in of card shutdowns for the kinds of behavior you might expect from travel hackers. In the comments to Frequent Miler's post on the card, we saw:

• "JH closed my account as soon as I loaded 5k onto it over two days, without even trying to withdraw anything. Another person I know also got the card closed on him after loading 5k (albeit at smaller pace). Useless garbage."
• "Had to battle with a lengthy hidden phone tree to finally reach a nice US based CSR. She told me, 'Well sir this card is designed to be loaded and used over time for regular purchases and you just loaded it up fast and then wd the money. You cant do that.'"
• "Just a warning. I had both of these [HR Block Emerald & JH Preferred]. They locked up my account within a week and it took several weeks for me to get my money back."
  

Meanwhile over at Flyertalk shutdown reports were likewise appearing:

• "$5k in via VR...$5k out via WM BP...Shutdown"
• "loaded 5k via vr over a week and a half. CA 5k. Shut down 1 day later."

The Free-quent Flyer's Official Recommendation

The JH Preferred card is essentially the ideal use case for Evolve Money. Unlike the MyVanilla Debit cards which come with a punishing $0.50 transaction fee on purchases and $1.95 cash advance fee, JH Preferred has no purchase transaction fee and no monthly fee if you load $1,000 or more to the card each month.

I would argue that Evolve Money has two distinct advantage over the traditional methods of liquidating PIN-based debit cards, when it comes to these "vulnerable" cards:

• Since Evolve Money payments are free, you can make multiple, smaller Evolve Money payments throughout the month, reducing the impression of "quick" loads and unloads;
• Since Evolve Money payments are instantly deducted from your card balance, there's no risk of your funds being frozen between loading a Vanilla Reload Network reload card to the account and your bill payment being deducted.

Ultimately, it's not a race: you can load $5,000 per month, whether you do it in the first 2 days of the month or over the course of 30 days. Since it doesn't cost anything to make as many transactions as you want, do yourself a favor and take your time.

Have you ordered a JH Preferred card yet? Do you have a plan to avoid shutdown?

Three Alaska Airlines signup bonuses

By now you may have seen the two Bank of America Alaska Airlines Signature Visa signup offers that have been widely reported:

• 40,000 MileagePlan miles: 25,000 on account approval and 15,000 after spending $10,000 within 6 months of account membership;
• 40,000 MileagePlan miles (personal and business): 25,000 on account approval and 15,000 miles after spending $2,000 in each of the first 12 months of account membership.

Obviously for my regular readers neither $10,000 in 6 months nor $24,000 in 12 months is a huge obstacle.

But that's not really the question.

The question is whether earning 2.5 or 1.625 MileagePlan miles per dollar (with the first and second offers, respectively) is the best use of that $10,000 or $24,000 in spend. There's no question that for many people it will be: I consider Alaska Airlines miles among the most valuable thanks to the ability to redeem them on both American Airlines and Delta Airlines, as well as Alaska itself. They also have a lot of premium international partner airlines which can give you enormous value per mile.

On the other hand, if you're earning 5% cash back at drug stores, you might be hard-pressed to decide between the cash and the speculative value of the airline miles.

That's why I'm happy to remind my readers that the 30,000 mile offer with no minimum spending requirement is still available.

Personally, I'll be holding out for another 50,000 mile signup bonus (plus I'm waiting for my credit report to cool off after my January application cycle). But if you're interested in MileagePlan miles and don't want to use your manufactured spending bandwidth on them, 30,000 miles is a very strong offer for this card.

Reminder: sign up for Uber (and use your damn Uber credit!)

If you haven't yet signed up for Uber under the temporarily higher $20 signup bonus (normally $10), my understanding is that offer is ending today. There's no doubt it'll be back, so there's no rush, but you may as well hop on it while the hopping is good. Your $20 credit will just sit in your account until you get around to using it.

And for those of you who were kind enough to sign up using my referral link, don't forget to use your $20 credit!

To get $45 worth of Uber credit for $5, just follow the instructions I posted earlier this month.

Just to contrast my Squarespace review, here's my Uber review in one sentence:

Uber works exactly like they say it does.

It's expensive (if you're actually paying for it!), but it's pretty cool watching your car's GPS move through the streets until it gets to where you are. And my Uber charges have all been within $1-2 of the "estimated" cost you can pull up on the app when requesting a ride.

On a funny note, my last Uber ride was $0.40 more than the credit balance I had in my account. I remember thinking to myself at the time, "there's no way they'll actually charge me $0.40, since the transaction will cost them at least $1 to process." But I'll be damned if I didn't get a $0.40 charge to my Chase Sapphire Preferred. Now that's standing on principle!

Housekeeping: coming site layout changes

I want to drop a quick note that this weekend I'm going to be fiddling around with this site's layout and formatting. This doesn't affect you in any way, and there shouldn't be any downtime, but some objects may be moved around the site so you may not be able to find everything exactly where you're accustomed to seeing it.

If you listen to any podcasts you may have heard ads from Squarespace, who happen to be my website's host. Since there's no other reason to know anything about Squarespace, let me give you my unvarnished review in one sentence:

Squarespace is pretty good at what they do, and terrible at everything else.

The main problem I have with the service is that they obviously have no sense of the ways that people actually design and build websites. If you think this website looks even halfway like a real website, it's because I hacked it together that way myself.

The key thing to know about the service is that all websites have to select a "template," of which they have quite a number to choose from. However, there's no way to know how a template actually works until you select it and start building the website. If it turns out that it doesn't suit your needs, you have to start over from scratch and rebuild the site. Content is saved, but that's small comfort – for me at least.

Anyway, that's how I'm going to be spending this weekend, so if I don't reply to e-mails or comments immediately, it's because I'll be swearing loudly at my computer.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Travel hacking is for lovers

At the beginning of the month I wrote up three techniques for manufacturing spend that

form a solid backbone of manufactured spend that is open to all US citizens and (I believe) virtually all resident aliens, as long as they have a tax ID number.

I got a lot of great responses and fielded a lot of questions about that post, but one question that came up a number of times was whether I could write a similar primer for those who aren't going it alone: techniques that are available to travel hackers with a partner, friend, or significant other who's willing to participate — at least to the extent necessary to score some free travel or cash rewards.

Of course, you can start by doubling the values I gave in that post, since your partner can sign up for accounts with all the same services you did. But there are other games which are better played together; let's now take a look at those.

Amazon Payments

This one's easy. You and your partner will need to enroll your respective Amazon accounts in the Amazon Payments service. After enrolling, one of you can send the other up to $1,000 each calendar month. I really like Amazon Payments not because it's insanely lucrative, but because it's insanely useful for making those odd-denomination purchases that periodically come up. For example, after being approved for the Chase British Airways Visa Signature and the Citi Platinum Select / AAdvantage World MasterCard a few weeks ago, I made $1,511.85 in purchases on the former and $2,519.75 on the latter. To trigger the 50,000 mile signup bonus on each card, I needed to reach $2,000 and $3,000 in purchases, so I just "topped off" the accounts with purchases of $488.15 and $480.25, respectively, using Amazon Payments.

Warning: under no circumstances send money back and forth between the same two Amazon Payments accounts. All payments should flow in only one direction. Deal?

The Southwest Companion Pass

Your humble blogger does not fly Southwest. But that's neither here nor there: the Southwest companion pass is an amazing value if you do, and if you have a partner you travel with on a regular basis. If you're not familiar with it, it's even better than it sounds. Unlike the companion tickets you earn on each account anniversary with the Delta Platinum and Reserve American Express cards, the Companion Pass is exactly that: whenever you buy — or redeem miles for — a Southwest ticket, you have the option of including a free ticket for your designated companion as well (although you're still responsible for airport taxes and fees, I believe, up to $10 or so per ticket).

There is only one correct way to get the Southwest Companion Pass: wait for the periodic 50,000 point signup bonuses from the Chase Rapid Rewards Premier Visa and Business Credit Card (currently available). Then spend $2,000 on each card to secure the signup bonuses and $6,000 on one or both cards to get you the rest of the way to the 110,000 points needed to secure the Companion Pass for the rest of the current calendar year and all of the next calendar year. For obvious reasons you'll want to get the Pass as early in the current year as possible to maximize the length of your Pass's validity.

Southwest points are fixed-value, meaning they can be redeemed for any seat on any flight, but the number of points required depends on the cost of a paid seat on that particular flight. As a point of reference, advance "Wanna Get Away" fares cost 70 Southwest points per dollar, so each point is worth roughly 1.43 cents each for those fares. That means that if you plan to redeem your entire signup bonus for flights with your companion, those points are worth $1,430 (in Southwest "Wanna Get Away" fares), and the card earns about 2.86% (ditto) on all purchases.

For answers to questions it would never occur to me to ask, head over to The Points Guy and read their great FAQ.

US Bank Visa Buxx

Unlike the Nationwide Visa Buxx that I covered last time, US Bank more-or-less strictly enforces the requirement that the "parent" and "teen" identities you give when signing up do not match. However, they don't have any restrictions on the age of the "teen" user. That means whoever your partner is, he's eligible! Read more about the US Bank (and Nationwide) Visa Buxx card in the refresher course I wrote last fall. I've been using both cards with a 100% success rate since then, so I don't believe there have been any relevant changes (though read through the comments for some corrections to my inadvertent errors).

Venmo

I've written a lot about Venmo since I've enjoyed using it with my Bank of America Alaska Airlines Debit Card (unfortunately no longer offered – existing cards will be retired in May, 2014). Using Venmo, you're allowed to send up to $3,000 per week using any true, bank-issued, checking-account-linked debit card.

In the travel hacking community we spend a lot of time talking about "PIN-enabled debit cards," but Venmo enforces a stricter standard than Walmart or Evolve Money. As far as I know (I'm sure you'll let me know in comments if I'm wrong), only real debit cards, linked to checking accounts, work with Venmo. That means your best options are the remaining mileage-earning debit cards. Here are the existing options that I know of:

• Suntrust Delta SkyMiles Check Card. One Delta SkyMile per dollar spent on the card. $75 annual fee.
• Bankoh Hawaiian Airlines Visa Check Card. One HawaiianMiles mile per $2 spent on "credit" or signature transactions. $3 monthly fee.
• ufb direct Airline Rewards Checking. One American Airlines AAdvantage mile per $2 spent with the card. No monthly maintenance fee.

Neither of the first two cards is perfect in the way the Bank of America Alaska Airlines debit card is: the Suntrust card has a high annual fee, and a bad reputation for shutting down accounts that are opened outside Suntrust's physical banking footprint, while the Bankoh card earns HawaiianMiles which, while they can be transferred to Hilton HHonors points at a 1 : 2 ratio, are not especially valuable for award redemptions. I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise, though — take a look at their award charts and let me know what I'm missing.

I know a lot of members of the community have had a lot of success with the ufb direct card, which I think is probably the best currently-available card to use with Venmo.

Conclusion

Travel hacking is a case study in synergy: the whole can be much more than the sum of its parts. The techniques above, plus authorized user cards when necessary, allow you to more than double your manufactured spend for each partner you add to your group. With new techniques being discovered every day, I truly believe that we are living in the golden age of travel hacking. Why not invite a friend?