Post Mortem: The Not So Bright Brightside $10 Cashback Promotion

In our second ever ‘Post Mortem’, we’re going to discuss a rather hilarious episode of degeneracy made possible by the Brightside Spend card, which we also recently did a card review on.

This method wasn’t a large-scale manufactured spending technique, but instead, just a clever way to get a whole lot of free food, drink, and gift cards via a cashback promotion.

The Method: $10 Takeout Top Up 

I have held the Brightside card for some time, for no reason in particular. I usually sign up for all free prepaids I come across on the off chance they have a useful feature or, better yet, a manufactured spending opportunity… 

In May 2021 I received an email from Brightside that intrigued me.

The Brightside Takeout top up promotion was a similar concept to Amex Shop Small, which I’m sure many readers are familiar with. However it’s much better than that. With Amex Shop Small, you must go out of your way to spend $10, and in return you receive $5 back, only once per shop…

With Brightside, I saw no mention of minimum spend or maximum number of transactions at one location. I quickly (and casually) confirmed this was the case with their online chat.

I first tested the promotion by doing a small transaction at a local restaurant. Sure enough, I receive nearly $11 top up on a $6 transaction. This is when it hit me that I was going to get paid to buy shit 🙂 

From here it was time to hit up all my favorite local breweries like Alleykat, Town Square, SYC, and Analog and fill up growlers/howlers (or other orders as close to $10 as possible) with my favorite beers.

But why stop there? I could only store so much beer and it goes bad fairly quickly if not canned. Brightside was also partnered with tons of great restaurants like OEB, Sugar Bowl, Dorinku, Campio, etc. 

So it was time to try ordering $10 gift cards. And sure enough this worked flawlessly. Asking employees to charge $50 to 5 separate gift cards did get some weird looks but who cares. Getting paid $1 per transaction to stock up on gift cards at some great restaurants and breweries can’t be beat.

Let’s take it even further…

The Method Scaled: Online Top Ups

Of course we can spend all day driving around to the different restaurants and breweries harvesting free gift cards. Great return and worth it, but still time intensive.

But what if it were easier? Enter online gift card loads. 

By figuring out which partners 1) sold online gift cards in increments of $10 or less, and 2) coded online purchases in a way that Brightside recognized as a partner – we were able to scale the Brightside promotion even further.

And that is where things got a little out of hand…

Brightside Strikes Back!!

Of course you can imagine what would happen eventually when a group of degenerate friends is left unchecked with what is effectively a gift card printing machine…

After careful review, Brightside decided to let us keep the cashback we had acquired, and give us a mere warning. They promptly unfroze our accounts and modified the terms of their promotion:

So naturally, we continued milking this promotion for the rest of the month (albeit at a slower and less abusive rate).

How Much Money Was Brightside Taken For?

I won’t explicitly implicate myself here by listing exact amounts, but this promotion was very lucrative for those who took advantage. Several of my colleagues looted upwards of $1,000 in gift cards and free beer/drink/food. The highest number was in excess of $1500.

The Death of Brightside $10 Top Ups

Alas, the Brightside $10 top up was a limited-time promotion that ended in May 2021, and was likely a deal spurred by the COVID-19 situation and desperation of small business (maybe some government grants involved as well). I’m still hopeful there will be more generous promotions in the future, but I do think Brightside has learned their lesson on offering top ups that are larger than the minimum transaction amounts (i.e. allowing you to make profit on purchases).

It was still nice to know we contributed a stimulus to the small business economy for a short time, all courtesy of Brightside and ATB 🙂