Tesco imposing the 30,000 points (72,000 Avios) per quarter cap on Clubcard earning

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• blenz101 says:

  28 Jul28 July 11:12

  Well it’s perfectly possible to have your ID verified to benefit from a much higher limit, details are on the 3V website.

  What is more likely is that extremely serious card collectors who flout Tesco’s rules of 5 cards per customer per day, don’t only earn points in the way a normal consumer would and earn them on business related expenses will have very few qualms setting up a multiple fake email accounts and create pay.com accounts associated with them.

  It’s a level of risk appetite that many wouldn’t have the time or stomach for. Personally I would be concerned with getting a CIFAS marker and my credit card account closed than anything pay.com would be able to enforce.

  • Nick says:

    28 Jul28 July 11:58

    What is the “5 cards per customer per day” rule? I’ve bought a lot more than that in a day, with the assistance of store managers who are fully aware of what I was doing and why.

    • mark2 says:

      28 Jul28 July 12:13

      Me too, although only four per transaction. How on earth can they enforce that in a large supermarket?

  • JQ says:

    28 Jul28 July 14:18

    … before 99% of people on here knew about 3V, I know people who were buying them (using cash) in order to stay anonymous.

  • Paul Manning says:

    28 Jul28 July 17:21

    A CIFAS and your card closed is unlikely to happen for buying something legitimately using your card and paying it off, in the users case where they paid their amex with 130+ 3v and it was closed with 3v this was not to do with purchasing the cards. What you choose to buy is your business.

    If your referring to some sort of credit check with 3v then I am sure they don’t do credit checks and they are in the Republic of Ireland.

    • Blenz101 says:

      29 Jul29 July 00:33

      Card issuers have a duty to investigate & prevent money laundering and report law enforcement where appropriate. Whilst all will agree this isn’t laundering the pattern of shifting the same money around has the potential to be detected as such by the card issuer.

      If using the standard method of 4 cards per transaction someone putting 200 x £100 in a single quarter at the same retailer could well be flagged as “unusual” spending pattern without being fraud with the card issuer still investigating.

      An explanation which included the repeated purchase of cash like instruments to generate points would be unlikely to find favour. I’m sure on most cards this is forbidden in the T&C and he may well see his accounts permanently closed with that group.

      Clearly this hasn’t happened in the case of Simon with £20k but nobody should be so naive as to think there isn’t an upper limit, especially true where manufactured spend is concerned.

• xcalx says:

  28 Jul28 July 11:16

  “What I’d like to know is how Simon (plus others?) get around the 3V/pay.com cap on £1625.00 per year”

  Its not per year its £1625 per account. Just open a new email account for every £1625. Or send Pay.com your details and your account is valid for upto £25000 per year

• Jonny says:

  28 Jul28 July 11:24

  As others have said, I don’t think Simon can feel overly aggrieved.
  – he’s saved c.£300 on tax charges
  – he’s earned £300 in clubcard points (72k Avios / £600 in Boost etc)
  – he may well have earned extra Avios (or other pts) from Tesco spend, plus 1 or 2 “2 for 1s” perhaps
  really should have just put half the spending through another account…!

• uk1 says:

  28 Jul28 July 11:30

  I do sometimes wonder when one reads posts making an ethical judgements about the character of someone doing what Simon and others have done whether it is motivated more by jealousy rather than some sort of higher genuine moral ground. Some of the comments are quite nasty. Most people are here to learn about maximising miles and very few think about others whilst doing what they do. It is a sort of “every man for themselves” (or woman 🙂 ) Advice about how he might have done it more sensibly is one thing, but moralising about it seems a bit misplaced here to me …..

  • M says:

    28 Jul28 July 14:45

    Amen

• Scott says:

  28 Jul28 July 11:39

  My record total was around 24,000 cc points and that was mostly due to game pre-orders.
  Would be nice if I could throw down a few £k a month on 3V cards 😉

  Scotland seems pretty good for 3V cards. The Perth store, for example, had loads last time I was in.
  One of my locals has a few, the other hasn’t had a single one since the pay.com cards came out. Loads of those red £25 fee based ones though (must be 20 pegs worth of them!)

  • Alan says:

    28 Jul28 July 11:44

    Shh – don’t give the game away 😉 Of course we need easy access to all these extra Avios after BA devalued RFS flights from the regions!

  • Nick says:

    28 Jul28 July 12:03

    I live in Zone 3 and I don’t struggle to find pay.com cards, although I’ve never bought more than £500 in one go.

    • Scott says:

      28 Jul28 July 12:25

      £250 is my max purchase…..generally £100 at a time.
      I have little patience entering the same details again and again and get bored after half a dozen – would help if I didn’t have to enter a password etc. every single time!
      Also, pain in the neck when they randomly or all fail so buying small amounts at least reduces the hassle.

  • CV3V says:

    28 Jul28 July 13:20

    Now i know who to blame for clearing out my regular supply!

  • Guy Fenton says:

    28 Jul28 July 13:59

    So your the swine who gets in before me and buys up all the pay.com cards in Perth! Heh heh!

    • CV3V says:

      28 Jul28 July 14:10

      i only ever do 2 or 4 at a time, plenty to go round!

  • Dom says:

    29 Jul29 July 09:16

    How do you get so many on game orders? Thought they were quite rare.

    Do you buy in bulk and sell on?

• Simon says:

  28 Jul28 July 12:22

  Well, I thought it was about time that I ‘entered the fray’ – I am the Simon of the piece. Having read the comments, I cannot elude some people’s vitriol and that’s fine enough – on pretty much every Airmiles forum I have been on in the last nine months (I am somewhat of a newbie), and on whatever subject, there have been those who have endorsed, others who have disparaged; that’s fine and somewhat balanced, I’ll admit. But I’d like to say a big thank-you to those who have said nice things above. Without question, this has been a learning curve. In my defence, though, I did actually bother to get the advice of some well-informed folk on FlyerTalk about my Tesco strategy prior to actually doing it—at no time was this 30k cap flagged to me. But that is hindsight now and, as I say, a cautionary tale, too, personally speaking. For what it is also worth, not once did I “clear” a shelf wherever I found Pay.com cards—I always left plenty for others HfP-ers like us, this in spite of the numbers I eventually bought (there are various Tescos outside of London which are routinely well-stocked and I never took the proverbial when I shopped: I made sure to leave plenty for others). In fairness, too, my tax bill was somewhat out of the blue and it has been difficult knowing quite how to settle it. For that reason, I just decided that, if I could, I’d like to get something back (CC points) for such colossal outlay to HMRC. I don’t entirely characterise this as greed, but others do and that might be fair enough as my view is clearly subjective. Whatever the case, though, positive or negative, the comments have been interesting to read and I wish everyone here well with their airmiles collecting, and I don’t doubt you’ll do it without making the kind of serious error of judgment that I have so clearly made. It has been a chastening experience for sure, I can tell you.

  • Alan says:

    28 Jul28 July 12:25

    Thanks for posting, Simon – on the upside at least you’ve still got a boatload of CC points (and 30k Tesco) for your trouble – sure beats just paying a massive card fee to HMRC!

    Personally I think Tesco should have capped earning on the account once it hit the 30k mark rather than continuing to add points and then removing them, but that’s just my view.

    • Simon says:

      30 Jul30 July 16:56

      Cheers, Alan — much appreciated. 😉

  • Marco says:

    28 Jul28 July 12:53

    Hi Simon, we’ve all lost loyalty points somewhere along the line… in my case, the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of airmiles lost by not having started this hobby 15 years ago! All the points I have earned over the last few years are entirely thanks to Rob and Head for Points (a website I discovered by pure chance!)

    • Simon says:

      30 Jul30 July 16:55

      Cheers, Marco. And I couldn’t agree more — if only I’d chanced upon Rob’s site a few years earlier! Still, trying (badly! :)) to be philosophical for a moment, I might have been saying the same thing in 2016, I suppose. 🙂

  • Worzel says:

    28 Jul28 July 13:01

    Thank you for sharing/qualifying your experience Simon.

    • Simon says:

      30 Jul30 July 16:42

      No problem at all, Worzel, and thanks for your comment. 😉

  • Jason says:

    28 Jul28 July 13:51

    Simon

    How were CS when you spoke to them?
    Did your reduction get attributed to a certain store?

    • Simon says:

      30 Jul30 July 16:45

      They were actually very pleasant, Jason, though, admittedly, I wasn’t speaking to anyone of a particularly high level. Indeed, the person I spoke to had to get advice from a colleague when I asked what had happened to my points as, somewhat ironically, like me they didn’t know about the cap.

  • CV3V says:

    28 Jul28 July 16:41

    Simon – the next thing to be careful on is redeeming the clubcard vouchers. A large redemption, say all £300, might be flagged for a manual check where they will check to ensure no abuse of Clubcard etc etc. Explaining to them it was pay.com cards bought for paying a VAT bill could be against the terms and conditions as use of Clubcard for business purposes. I say this not on experience but based on others experiences on other blogs. Depending on what you are planning on using the vouchers for (avios?) then i would split any redemption into smaller batches to avoid flagging it.

    • Fenny says:

      28 Jul28 July 20:33

      There’s absolutely no reason to say why he bought what he bought. Gift cards, 3V or otherwise, are bought as gifts. He may just have a large family! Or, he may be buying them as quiz prizes for the local pub quiz night. Etc etc. He’s done nothing illegal.

      • CV3V says:

        29 Jul29 July 08:13

        I’m not saying he has done anything illegal either – I am flagging up that if he gives the true answer as to how he got the points he may be in contravention of the Clubcard rules and therefore to be careful. Again, this isn’t based on my opinion but is based on the actual experiences of the hardcore users on PTS.

    • Simon H says:

      28 Jul28 July 22:01

      True Fenny. From experience I’ve been flagged once on a Tesco to BA and my wife on a Tesco to Virgin. Both times involved transfers of over 100k Tesco points. When we spoke to Tesco on the phone each time they only really wanted to make sure someone else wasn’t trying to use our accounts.

      • Jason says:

        30 Jul30 July 19:38

        Simon H

        I was told, on a virgin transfer last year, that anything over £500 had to go through a security check. Which delayed my points transfer. As it was for 4 UC flights to Orlando, during October half term I wasn’t pleased when they informed me it could take up to 28 days to complete.
        When I informed them the flights would not be there in 24 hrs they pretty much did it instantly.
        I’m curious to know what the limit is, for Avios, as I’ll be doing some transfers before calling tesco clubcard about my missing points, although slightly different as I have a contemporaneous note of a conversation, on the 16th June, informing me that our merged account was allowed 60,000 pts per quarter, 30k per member.

    • Simon says:

      30 Jul30 July 16:46

      Thanks for this, CV3V — I think you’re right and I need to be a little more circumspect when it comes to my Tesco CC earning patterns and redemptions of! 🙂

• uk1 says:

  28 Jul28 July 12:36

  Simon, basically people that do what you did, or at least attempted should be admired and be seen as an example to us all. Without Rob and examples like you I’d never have taken loads and loads of F trips to Singapore and Oz with my wife over the years. You fell fail of a limit that many might not be aware of, but your nose for a few more miles is what we should all admire and we should mourn your loss rather than sneer and jeer at you for trying!

  Good on you mate! 🙂

  • Simon says:

    30 Jul30 July 16:41

    Thank you, UK1 — this means a lot, actually, especially in light of my recent imposed CC forfeit.

• Tilly71 says:

  28 Jul28 July 13:38

  FT people may know about flights but obviously not much about how to collect Tesco points or someone would of pointed out the 30k max on an account per quarter.
  You still done well out of this, 30k of pts for nothing, well a bit of work inputting and you cannot pay HMRC using a credit card so potentially the cb or additional MR points from the initial card purchases.
  I hope you well with any future collecting, check out this site or PTS if you ever need any more Clubcard collecting advise rather than FT.

  • Simon says:

    30 Jul30 July 16:48

    Many thanks, Tilly.

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