Nearly Fee-Free Online Gift Card Liquidation

EDIT: This deal is unfortunately on life-support. Many cards aren't working any more, but a few still are. I think it's unfortunately not long for the world though. Additionally, Stockpile has implemented a $100 card load limit per 24 hours, which makes this a waste of time in my opinion.

I was first introduced to Stockpile on black Friday 2020 when they ran a promotion for the holidays that let you buy stock gift cards with a limit of $10,000 per day using a credit card, all fee-free. I "only" spent $25,000 during the promotion because I was involved in the holidays and I never gave it the focus I should have. (There was also a period of time when you could add some credit cards to your account and fund directly from there, but that died before I'd ever even heard of Stockpile.)

Since then, they've been ripe for manufactured spend because they still accepted "debit card" loads in certain ways:

• When PayPal Key was introduced, you could add it directly to your account and it was recognized as a debit (and side note, it also coded as 4x with the AmEx Personal Gold when PPK supported AmEx)
• Even after you couldn't add PayPal Key to your account any-more, you could still fund it with PPK cards already attached, and this still works with certain cards behind your PPK
• Some rewards debit cards could be added to Stockpile and funded as a purchase, so you'd earn rewards on funding
• Some Visa and Mastercard gift cards could be linked to your account and then cashed out
• Fee-free gift cards that could be purchased with a credit card came back in July, but it died again. Watch for a new promotion this black Friday though

As I mentioned most of those things stopped working, but there's still a ton of utility at Stockpile. You can still buy stock gift cards with no fees using a rewards debit card (Point doesn't earn rewards but others do), and several Visa and Mastercard varieties work too. My favorite is the SecureSpend Visa variety that you can buy at CVS. Those cards have BIN 409758 and are well stocked at most stores. Of course any credit card at CVS will work, but I buy these with a Freedom Flex or with Venmo/PayPal checkout in store.

Once you've got a compatible debit card or gift card, here's what you do:

• Go to stockpile.com/gift-cards (no need to login, and it's probably better if you don't)
• Click "Buy-Now"
• Choose the purple "This is a gift card for stock" card
• Enter the gift card face value
• Checkout

Ok, so technically you're converting your gift card to stock, not cash, so this is a stocking-out instead of a cashing-out I guess? But the trick is to buy a low volatility stock ticker that doesn't change much at all on a day to day basis, something like VGSH, then you can later sell it for within a few cents of your purchase price and transfer the money to your bank account. 

Caveats with this:

• Stockpile transactions execute at the closing market price (normal trading day, 4:00 PM Eastern)
• Stockpile limits you to one gift card purchase, per stock-ticker, per day (so, find some low-volatility tickers to scale)
• Stockpile limits the total number of gift card purchases for an email address, but you can just enter new email addresses at checkout and redeem to the same account
• Not all Visa and Mastercard gift cards work, but many do
• Buying and selling stocks may impact your taxes

What might get you shutdown? I have no idea, I'm not aware of any shutdowns yet. But, here are my best practices:

• I try and hold the stock for at least a couple of days
• I wait until the official market settlement period after selling a stock before transferring cash out (3 business days is the worst case settlement)
• I batch ACH cash-outs rather than doing them one at a time
• I also occasionally buy a stock I'm planning on holding for a few months (my current favorite is AMR because of the skyrocketing price of steel)

Why is this "nearly" fee-free as suggested by the title? Well, low volatility stocks like VGSH do change slightly on a day-to-day basis, so a $500 gift card may turn into $499.85 by the time you sell it;  let's call that a fee. Unlike most fees though, it could swing the other way and cash-out at  $500.15 when you sell, so hopefully it all averages out in the end.

Good luck friends, and as always, I'm deeply appreciative for you and your support.

My usual disclaimer: I'm not a financial advisor, and I'm definitely not your financial advisor You probably shouldn't take my advice on anything, ever.