If you love miles and points and read other blogs, chances are you buy prepaid gift cards. I came upon something interesting the other day on Ebay. I saw that people sell Visa, Amex, and Mastercard gift cards that have no value left on them. What’s more shocking to me is that there are actually buyers for these gift cards.
Here’s a few examples of completed sales on Ebay for these gift cards:
Just from these examples, you can see that you can get anywhere from $1 per card to $5 per card.
These are listed as “collectibles.” Clearly, if you buy a lot of gift cards, this could be one way to reduce your purchase fees. Once you have exhausted the balance on the gift card (gone to Wal Mart), put them up for sale in ebay. Obviously, it requires extra effort on your part to sell these through Ebay. You will lose a few bucks to Ebay for commission, and some for shipping. However, if you can get the right price, you could significantly reduce your cost for MS and as a result be earning miles and points for minimal out of pocket expenses.
Keep in mind that the buyer would have access to your transaction history, but as long as you don’t care about that, it should be ok. Be careful selling used gift cards if you have officially registered any cards with your name and address for online shopping purposes. You don’t want the buyer to be able to access any of that information.
I haven’t tried this, mostly because I don’t buy that many gift cards. Has anybody done this?
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