Chase Shutdown After Redeeming Millions of Points from 50+ Ink Cards in One Year
Shut downs from banks or airlines happen often. Sometimes the cardholder might be in the right, and sometimes there might be a good reason for the shutdown. The latter seems to be case this time. Chase has shut down one customer who opened tons of Chase Ink cards over the last year and redeemed over 7 million Chase Ultimate Rewards through Pay Yourself Back.
The first thing you are going to ask is how is it even possible to open that many Chase cards when there’s a Chase 5/24 rule. The 5/24 rule limits who can open a new Chase credit card, based on how many cards they have opened within the past two years. You will not be approved for most Chase cards if you’ve opened five or more personal credit cards (from any card issuer) within the past 24 months. But there are some pre-approved offers that let you bypass this rule. However, even those offers might normally get you a card or two, and certainly not millions of points.
In this case there were some specific links that were used, which were generated from those pre-approved offers. The links were made public a few days ago and quickly died. Those in the know could apply for two Chase Ink cards monthly. So doing this for over a year for several people can easily get you millions of points. 7 million Chase Ultimate Rewards are over $100,000 when redeemed through through Pay Yourself Back with a Chase Sapphire Reserve card. And that wasn’t even the total of points that was accrued through these links.
I guess being shut down and not being able to get any Chase cards for the foreseeable future after such a massive haul of points is not that bad after all. That’s if there are no legal issues afterwards. We have seen people arrested for opening Amex cards, hotels scams in Japan for over $1M, and for a Nordstrom Online Reward scheme.
