Can you send £100 – not £50 – per year from TopCashback to Tesco to Avios or Virgin?

Love Clubcard, don’t collect Avios?  You should be reading our sister site, Shopper Points (www.shopperpoints.co.uk), which covers the latest Clubcard and Nectar offers without any distracting frequent flyer talk!  Why not check it out now?

TopCashback, like Quidco, is a site which allows you to earn a small amount of cashback on your day to day shopping by clicking through to participating merchants.

You can join TopCashback via my refer-a-friend link here.  You do not receive anything extra, unfortunately, but it helps to support HFP and you are no worse off than joining directly.

In 2013, TopCashback launched a feature allowing you to pay your cashback directly into your Tesco Clubcard account – and give you a 5% bonus on top!

This dramatically increased the value of TopCashback cashback versus Quidco:

£10 of cashback earned at Quidco earns you £10

£10 of cashback earned at TopCashback earns you £10.50 (with the 5% bonus) paid into your Tesco Clubcard account. That gives you 1,050 Clubcard points. These convert into 2,520 Avios points or 2,625 Virgin Flying Club miles. You are effectively ‘buying’ Avios points for just 0.4p each.

You can transfer up to £50 of cashback per year from TopCashback to Clubcard (a year runs from the date of your first Tesco transfer, not the calendar year or from the date you joined). This means that you can earn up to 12,000 Avios or Virgin Flying Club miles per year this way!

In theory, once you have hit your £50 annual cap on transferring to Clubcard, you can transfer further cashback directly to Avios points. For every £1 of cashback you earn, you will have the choice of taking £1 as cash into Paypal or your bank account or receiving 105 Avios points.  This means you are buying Avios points at roughly 1p each, which is not great.

Is there, however, a way of transferring £100 – not £50 – per year into the same Clubcard account?

I heard about this method a couple of months ago but was not sure it would work.  It was recently corroborated on Flyertalk so it seems to be OK – technically.  It does break TopCashback rules, though, so I do not recommemd it.

It requires a Tesco Clubcard MasterCard.  You can learn all about this card in my review here – the headline details are that you earn 0.6 Avios points per £1 spent and there is a sign-up bonus of 1,000 Clubcard points if I refer you (this can be done retrospectively if you got the card in the last 2-3 months).

Your Tesco Clubcard MasterCard is linked to your existing Clubcard account.  However, a new Clubcard number is generated which is printed on the front of your credit card, under the main credit card number.

As far as Tesco is concerned, both of these Clubcard numbers refer to the same Clubcard account.

This means that you can send £50 of cashback from your TopCashback account to Clubcard using your original Clubcard number, and then swap over to the 2nd Clubcard number and do the same again for another £50.

There is a big problem, though.  The TopCashback terms and conditions say:

“Each Clubcard Account can only be linked to a maximum of 1 TopCashback Account. Multiple TopCashback or Tesco Clubcard Accounts cannot be created to try and withdraw more cashback as Tesco Clubcard Points. Any attempts to do this will result in the TopCashback Account being terminated, and any cashback/clubcard points being revoked.”

Given the generosity of the existing TopCashback / Tesco deal, and the fact that you would lose any cashback working its way through the TCB system if your account was closed, I do not recommend this even though it is being discussed elsewhere.

Love Clubcard, don’t collect Avios?  You should be reading our sister site, Shopper Points (www.shopperpoints.co.uk), which covers the latest Clubcard and Nectar offers without any distracting frequent flyer talk!  Why not check it out now?