That is, by far, the funniest thing I have seen this week. When I heard of the Mint's offer for these coins at face value, I knew there was some way to profit from it; I just didn't know what it was. I wish I were that clever.
That was one way, another was to simply use a card that gives cash back on purchases The problem isn't to get the coins into the banks, they want to get them into circulation. The banks don't want them so once the buyers dumped them at the banks, the banks sent them back to the Fed. Net result, the government paid $3.50 per box to ship them from the mint to the Federal Reserve.
My Bank of America MC gives me points I can redeem for cash every time I purchase something. They mail me a check directly if I cash them in online. Wow.. I could have been rich! lol
Brilliant! Thanks for sharing the article... Anyone ever seen the Adam Sandler film Punch Drunk Love? As a part of the plot his character does something similar with a rebate points program from grocery store products.
Reminds me of when I was college, some of my friends and I sent in around 10,000 self-addressed stamped envelopes to McDonalds to get free game pieces for the Monopoly game they do every year. Every envelope with an SASE we sent (cost around 80 cents in postage) got us at least $2 in Best Buy bucks to spend at Best Buy (really worth $4 as they had codes to use online and then you could use in store). Many of the game pieces we got were worth much more. Between the few of us we ended up with about around $50,000 in merchandise from Best Buy for a cost of around $8,000 or so. All of us got iPods, free lifetime Sirius radios and every DVD, CD and Video Game we could think of wanting. None of us won any of the big prizes though. Plus we had so much free food game pieces that everyone we knew on campus was eating for free all month and we ended up donating around 1000 free food game pieces to a local homeless shelter. Of course, McDonalds/Best Buy altered the rules and prize values after that to make it not worth exploiting
Anyone here read fatwallet forums? There's been a thread over there about this for over a year. It's amazing the amount of dollar coins that some of them have ordered. http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/837472?highlight_key=y&keyword1=dollar+coins
