Okay – so by now you’ve heard the news, right? Amazon Payments is no more as of October 12 (at least for person-to-person payments, which is what most of us travel bloggers used it for). And while that’s a bummer, as someone pointed out, it’s really only 1000 miles a month which probably isn’t a HUGE loss for most people. The one thing that I will most miss is that it was an easy way for new people to get into the Manufactured Spending game. It was easy to explain and easy to do too (kind of like the old US Mint deal)
Time to hit it hard then?
So, personally, I would only do Amazon Payments with my wife and I. I sent her $1000 each month, and then she sent me $1000 as well. I know that there were some people that would do different amounts, like a $634 and a $362, being careful never to hit EXACTLY $1000. This was supposedly to not attract attention. On the other hand, I know that there were people who had many accounts and did $1000 of Amazon Payments to the tune of several (tens of?) thousand dollars each month.
Brief social network interruption!!! Have you thought about following Points With a Crew on Twitter? Or maybe Facebook?
Generally speaking, most bloggers took the advice that it was not wise to really push Amazon Payments, since there were reports of people’s accounts getting shut down, and if that happened, then you wouldn’t be able to use the service any more.
But….. now that they’re stopping it anyways…. who cares if you get banned, right?
So this is a bad idea, right?
Surely this is not a good idea, right? I mean I’ve got my financial firewalls set up, so what’s going to happen? It would be annoying if I had to get a new Amazon account (especially after I started doing some reselling with them). If I had the payments go to a bank account that wasn’t with my “main” banking institution, then would the only downside be them putting a hold on that account? It’s not illegal, right?
I don’t know – it’s probably a bad idea and I doubt I’ll do anything but my regular 2 person activities over the next 2 months, but I hope I’m not the only one that at least THOUGHT about it….
(In case it needs to be said, again, in bold print DON’T DO THIS! I DON’T RECOMMEND IT! YOU COULD GET YOURSELF IN A LOT OF TROUBLE!)
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
Hi Dan,
Did you get a chance to read this post? http://hackmytrip.com/2014/08/amazon-local-register-buy-miles
If you did, I’m a newbie, how exactly do you use Amazon’s new money transfer service to manufacture spend? Could you give an example? Do I need a credit card merchant account first? (I do know how Square work.)
I haven’t read too much about it – from what I understand it basically costs 1.75% to manufacture spend, and personally that’s not worth it to me. I may be missing something but generally, for the amount of real-life time I have to travel, I’m able to get enough points just from credit card signups and basic spend.
Thanks for your reply, Dan.