NFL card madness as Barclays finally wises up!

BARCLAYS CRACKING DOWN ON MULTIPLE APPS?: We’ve linked a few times to Rapid Travel Chai’s impressive App-O-Rama, where he applied for 13 cards at once including 5 Barclays apps. 11 of the 13 were approved, including 4 of 5 Barclays. Can you have similar fun with the new $400 NFL card offer?

It looks like the answer is no, mostly. One quirk of the Barclays system is that the NFL Visa and the NFL Mastercard are considered to be two different products, so folks who got the Mastercard last fall the first time the $400 bonus was offered have been getting approved for the Visa, and vice versa.

But: in the last day or two people who got the card within the last 90 days have been getting auto-denied, without even so much as a credit pull, and multiple posters report that customer service reps have confirmed the 90-day auto-deny rule. So if you opened a Barclays card less than 90 days ago, you’ll have to wait.

Of course, you may be wondering about multiple apps for the same card in the same day. Here’s what one poster wrote on Slickdeals:

Wife and I just applied for 8 cards back-to-back-to-back. Approved for ALL!!! WOOHOO This is the easiest card we’ve ever applied for.

Got 5 Visas limits 6,000 8,500 6,000 8,500 6,000
Got 3 Mastercards limits 4,000 (quite low) 5,000 5,500

$400 / $1000 on all cards!

As of today my Credit Karma core is 715 and wife’s is 720

It will be $3,200 in free money!!!!!!!!! It’s gonna be a good Super Bowl. This is probably the slickest deal ever!!

If he’s telling the truth and he actually pulled that off, good for him. However, there are a few posts from today where people have reported multiple app attempts resulting with either all apps being deferred/denied or else one approval and the rest deferred/denied. It would seem, then, that Barclays has seen a lot of interest in this particular offer (the SD thread is up to 40+ pages and counting), and that they’ve finally caught on to people gaming their app system.

GIFT CARDS, PREPAID DEBIT CARDS GETTING HARDER TO BUY: Due to widespread coverage on the blogs, credit card issuers aren’t the only ones tightening up. As Frequent Miler and The Points Guy have both noted, Office Depot is no longer selling $500 Amex/Visa gift cards. For those of you who haven’t been keeping up, people have been using the Chase Ink (5% back at office supply stores) to buy gift cards, sometimes in considerable amounts. It’s surprising that this particular scheme has lasted so long–Frequent Miler first went public with Vanilla Reloads last spring. We can’t help but wonder what deals are currently out there but non-public, and whether they’re more likely to stay non-public in the future as large companies wise up and talented credit card churners become less inclined to share with the rest of the internet.