A place to think

MSN Cashbacks: your personal ATM

Here (apparently) goes the story:

1- you register as an Ebay seller, or find one that has the product described below at poin 2)

2- set up a 750$ cash product (i.e. customer pays 750$ via PayPal to get 750$ cash)

3- the cashback appears to be 35%, i.e. 250$ circa

4- buy your own cash product

5- walk away with 250$ worth of free-money / say thank you

Simple isn’t it? you buy your 750$ for 750$, and Microsoft gives you 250$ for having done all the legwork. According to MSFT recent balance sheet, they can accommodate about 100,000,000 of transactions.

Apparently, it has been possible for a short while. For all the efforts and time that engineers and strategists might have put into thinking through the cashback product, there is always someone smarter out there that can game the system.

Were I in their shoes, I’d hire the guy. This is arbitrage at its best.

Post to Twitter Post to Digg Post to Facebook Post to Google Buzz Post to Reddit Post to StumbleUpon Post to Technorati

No Responses to “MSN Cashbacks: your personal ATM”

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Arbitraging Microsoft « Professional Management - [...] Great post in Think-Through on an arbitrage scheme using Microsoft’s recently introduced cashback [...]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Powered by WordPress | Designed by Elegant Themes

Bad Behavior has blocked 34 access attempts in the last 7 days.