SVM Gift Cards Cash Advance
SVM Gift Cards is probably the second most popular gift card seller on eBay. No, they don’t code as 5X like PayPal Digital Gifts, but SVM often has profitable cards for sale. An example of a currently popular deal they are running is this Lowe’s card offer.
But you might want to think twice before purchasing cards from SVM as of now. Apparently they recently changed their merchant coding. This change means that purchases from their eBay store paid for via PayPal are coding as cash advances with most cards.
According to Doctor of Credit, most Visa & Mastercard credit cards are coding as a cash advance while Amex cards are not. This issue is probably not purposeful so let’s hope that SVM gets it fixed quickly.
What to Do Now?
For now it does seem that Amex cards are immune to this cash advance treatment, although the best protection is to use a card with a cash advance limit of $0. You could also use your bank account, debit card or PayPal balance to buy the cards, but no rewards = no fun!
Lower Spend - Chase Ink Business Preferred® 100K!
Chase Ink Business Preferred® is a powerful card that earns 3X Ultimate Rewards points in a broad range of business categories on the first $150K in spend per year. Right now earn 100K Chase Ultimate Rewards points after Learn more about this card and its features!
Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.
According to my credit issuer they are of the opinion this was not an accident on SVMs part. I think its dirty business personally.
[…] cards have been added to the list such as Southwest, Lowe’s AMC etc. Read about the recent cash advance fees with SVM before […]
Just as a side note, you can also use Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx gift cards for payment through PayPal. That should avoid any worries about cash advance fees.
Good point. Thanks Barry!
That is bad info for mastercard and visa. Cash advances on gift cards is not allowed and seeing how it is posting like this for both visa and MC, this means it will post that way for their prepaid variants. AMEX should work tho.
Datapoint.
It looks like direct ebay entry may be coding as cash advance also. My citi DC and my blispay would not work via direct entry. I had to use my hilton amex on both accounts as it would not accept them. However, when i tried direct entry amex via ebay that also did not work, i had to use paypal. This is a little confusing because i know i have boughtmore than 600$ in cards via direct entry before, but then again maybe it wasnt that high.
Anyway, it looks like we may be stuck with amex only for a little while with svm. If anyone has any direct entry datapoints they would like to share please update.
Hi CJ. I never said that Visa and Mastercard gift cards would work for payment with SVM. All that I meant to say is that if you use Visa or Mastercard gift cards through PayPal, there is no chance of having a cash advance transaction take place.
I’ll be using my Chase Ink card to buy more AmEx gift cards at office supply stores until the SVM situation gets fixed.