Giving up on Drop? Unlink your accounts!

For the last few weeks a lot of us have been messing around with the "Earn With Drop" smartphone application.

As you may have seen around the blogosphere (Miles to Memories, Angelina Travels), Drop has suddenly cracked down on potentially lucrative uses of the application, as well as on folks who were just using it to grind out worthless points here and there on their everyday purchases.

It doesn't matter what I think, but...

Whenever these opportunities come along people get into the speculation game, and trust me, I'm no exception.

So let's speculate.

First of all, the company's current business model is clearly unsustainable, which they discovered (along with the rest of us) when they found they couldn't meet the redemption requests coming in for gift cards out of the limited amount of venture capital they had raised so far.

Second, the company may be in violation of certain banking and international currency rules, since they're based in Canada and for some reason have failed to incorporate a US-based subsidiary. That means not only are they transmitting bank transaction data internationally but they're also sending money across the border in the form of gift cards to folks who have inputted nothing more than an e-mail address. I'm not a lawyer (and I'm definitely not your lawyer), but there are rules on cross-border financial flows that this gift card nonsense is clearly indifferent to. 

Third, they've changed their Terms and Conditions page to exclude the kinds of transactions many of us were doing after the relevant transactions had occurred. Ordinarily I would say that's a violation of US law, except it's a Canadian company acting as a fly-by-night operation in the United States, so who knows what laws it violates?

All this stuff will get to court eventually, probably civil, maybe criminal, and I'll cash my $0.85 settlement check when it arrives.

That's not what this post is about.

Unlink your accounts before you delete Drop!

This post is about reminding you, before you delete the Drop app, to unlink any bank and credit card accounts you had linked inside the app! If the company does have a business model (an open question), it revolves around monetizing your transaction history. If you delete the app without unlinking your accounts, they'll keep monitoring and monetizing your transaction history until they go bankrupt and get acquired by someone even less scrupulous than them (if that's possible), who will do even more terrible things with your transaction history.

Don't let that happen. Unlink your banks and credit cards as soon as you suspect your account has been frozen.

Then grab some popcorn and wait for the fireworks.