My experience with free 5% Back Visa Simon Giftcards

A number of bloggers have mentioned some current promotions going on related to 5% Back Visa gift cards. One potential money-making approach is to buy $500 cards through GiftCardMall for $480.95 each. That is unfortunately limited by GiftCardMall's frequent and inexplicable flagging of large gift card orders.

Another current opportunity is purchasing 5% Back Visa Simon Giftcards in-person at Simon Malls locations. The cards are currently being sold with no activation fees at many, if not most, Simon Malls in the United States.

My local mall finally restocked today, so I headed down to find out whatever I could.

5% Back Visa Simon Giftcards really are free this week

You never know when this kind of promotion comes around what kind of limits or restrictions will be placed on purchases. At my Simon Mall, the guest services manager was happy to ring up my order exactly as usual, while waiving the activation fee. Most Simon Malls limit gift card purchases to a total order amount of $10,000, including activation fees. Since activation fees are waived I assume that means you would be able to purchase twenty 5% Back Visa Simon Giftcards for a total of $10,000.

The promotion runs through Sunday, December 11, 2016.

5% Back Visa Simon Giftcards are PIN-enabled as usual

The Visa gift cards sold at Simon Malls are issued by Metabank, with a default PIN of the last four digits of the card number. 5% Back Visa Simon Giftcards are no exception, and are fully functional Metabank PIN-enabled debit cards. My firm expectation is that merchants which don't accept Metabank PIN-enabled debit cards will not accept these either.

Debit purchases at CVS don't require the last four digits of the card number

There are a lot of CVS store locations in the United States. While the CVS point-of-sale terminals do not instruct cashiers to compare customers' identification with the name on their credit card, there are no doubt particular cashiers who, out of an abundance of caution, will try to compare the name on your card with the name on your identification documents.

However, when making a PIN-based purchase at CVS, the system does not prompt cashiers to enter the last four digits of the debit card's number, so there's no occasion for them to notice that your debit card doesn't have any name embossed on it, let alone your name.

Conclusion

I'm sure most of my readers with convenient access to Simon Mall locations have already begun experimenting with these cards, so won't find anything too groundbreaking here. On the other hand if you've been waiting to dive in until you were more confident that 5% Back Visa Simon Giftcards were as easy to liquidate as whichever products you're currently using, I hope this post is reassuring.

Even if you don't take advantage of the 5% Back feature of these cards (which can be cumbersome), this deal is just about as close to free as manufactured spend gets these days, and I have every intention of making the most of it.