I had posted about what not to do with cash back, after writing that post I did it about three more times. Then I saw a great deal on Raise and bought another card to combine. I had been playing with fire with the gift card churning and TopCashBack.
Once I included the Raise purchase, the vendor shut me down and terminated all of my cards, all $255 worth. So how can you protect yourself? Don’t gift card churn through buying gift cards with gift cards.
This is not the first time I was burned through a Raise purchase. I had once bought a Home Depot card using TopCashBack for 2% then attempted to sell on Plastic Jungle for the extra 2.5%. It turns out that the Home Depot card was merchandise credit and Plastic Jungle wouldn’t buy. I had to sell it on Cardpool for a much lower amount.
I would be extremely careful with purchases on Raise. I wouldn’t write them off yet, as I had found some legitimate cards.
Now, back to the title of the post, how I dealt with this case. I had gone on vacation and checked the value of the cards before leaving and validated the cash was there. While I was away I was alerted from Cardpool when I tried to sell one card that there was no value. At first, I thought I had made a mistake. When I came back from vacation, I checked the card on my desk and it had said it was redeemed as well. I was nervous, but I called up their customer service number and spoke to one agent. He escalated me to a different agent who researched the situation for a good 15 minutes with me on the phone. She then realized this was a complicated scenario and would report back to me on Monday. Likely, she will speak to a supervisor and see if I should still be a Cabela’s customer.
It doesn’t hurt to call customer service to get to the bottom of it. I’ll post back soon, hopefully with good news. I have also notified Raise that Cabela’s cancelled the card because it was originally funded through fraudulent means.
