Well I had an experience with my Chase Cash plus Rewards card lately that got me thinking. Well you know that bright idea I had with purchasing about 3 playstation 3s at launch and trying to turn them around for a profit on Ebay, well yeah it failed miserably and I ended up returning every single one of them shortly after Christmas. Well here’s where the arbitrage comes in. I bought them at a normal Wal-mart so when I purchased them I got 1% cash back. Well I ended up returning them to a Super-Walmart on which I get 5% cash back on all my purchases because it’s considered a grocery store. Well when I returned them they took 5% off my rewards statement for each one. All in all I lost $72 cash because of my return process.

Well that got me thinking in theory if I was an unethical person I could simply take my cash rewards cards and load them up with high end purchases at Super-Walmart and then return them to normal Wal-mart, pocketing 4% on each transaction. Even though I sort of kind got screwed over returning things the wrong way I won’t be using my rewards cards this way as I already max them out and well sooner or later someone would figure it out and I don’t want to wreck what is already a good thing, but just food for thought.