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Cash Advance Fees for Buying Some Gift Cards on eBay: What You Need to Know

Shawn Coomer
Shawn Coomer

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SVM Gift Cards Cash Advance

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!

Disclosure: Miles to Memories has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Miles to Memories and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers.

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Shawn Coomer
Shawn Coomerhttps://milestomemories.com/
Shawn Coomer earns and burns millions of miles/points per year circling the globe with his family. An expert at accumulating travel rewards, he founded Miles to Memories to help others achieve their travel goals for pennies on the dollar. Shawn also runs a million dollar reselling business, knows Vegas better than most and loves to spend his time at the 12 Disney parks across the world.

Responses are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

6 COMMENTS

  1. According to my credit issuer they are of the opinion this was not an accident on SVMs part. I think its dirty business personally.

  3. 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.

      • 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.

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At Miles to Memories we share the best tips, tricks and deals plus travel rants, musings, hotel, airline and loyalty program reviews and a lot more! Our goal is to help people save money so they can get out there and travel the world! Through our various blog posts, podcasts & videos we teach others how to maximize loyalty rewards, hotel & airline programs and credit cards to achieve amazing things.

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