New Curve Card grief

[The Urbanite]

Carlos wrote:

masaccio wrote:

Wow, lots of Curve hate. What did they do to y’all?

stop supporting amex within hours – after days or even weeks of shilling it customers and the world wide web
claim they will or have taken amex to court and that it will come back – oh the audacity
beef up customer user stats to get mega funding – who doesnt these days?
poor customer service – days or even weeks of ignoring
MS game is pretty much over

there are some pros as opposed to cons left though

As well as

– Allow two cards on one account with their own set of limits, totalling £300k a month/£3.2m pa
– Turn a blind eye to deposits to NS&I and Kent Reliance savings accounts and HMRC payments for years
– Turn off MCC passthrough which meant the Creation IHG and Marriott cards could be maxed out to full spending capacity and points could be earned on cash withdrawals
– Facilitated the paying off of credit cards that had been used for MS in order to double dip
– Paid out Curve Cash at retailers where unlimited volume MS routes were available

To be honest, as a company they created easy opportunities to generate serious amounts of points which were never going to last forever, but lasted way longer than expected.

Generating points on Amex has been entirely possible without Curve – for example the Swipe cashback debit card accepted Amex topups up to £16k a week per funding card for free. And Amex could be used to top up prepaid cards at the Post Office self service machines. Curve probably did a lot of people a favour no longer taking Amex as if you get flagged MSing during a credit review (aka financial review in the US), your accounts would be gone.

Curve is still a good product for people prepared to adapt to the current market conditions, which are decided anti-MS where the low hanging fruit routes are concerned!

[Rui N.]

Creation lasted many years after MCC codes started being passed through.

[The Urbanite]

Rui N. wrote:

Creation lasted many years after MCC codes started being passed through.

Yes, but a lot of the easy routes were through MCC 6012 merchants, which Creation put very low spend limits on. When Wirecard collapsed and passthrough switched off, it became easier to spend on it and Capital on Tap too.

Don’t get me wrong, it was child’s play to MS Creation through MCC 4829 and other routes – was going on for years without any issues until Curve came and presumably facilitated volumes that forced the issuers hand in putting a stop to it. One easy route was topping up MoneyMailMe. Easy points until one day their MCC changed to 7372 which was bizarrely revealed to be a cash advance MCC in Creation’s logic! Fortunately it changed to 6012 not long after.

[Rui N.]

Most people just put £9k per day on Ernie.

[The Urbanite]

Rui N. wrote:

Most people just put £9k per day on Ernie.

That’s alright if you have a big enough bankroll to do this with the 8 days its takes to get the deposit back!

Some of the Creation friendly routes had a much shorter cycle, i.e. using it to make an instant deposit to current account or debit card.