Free $10 From Serve By American Express

I was updating Frequent Flyer University’s Facebook page and saw an interesting ad for American Express’s Serve which is a Peer-To-Peer mobile payment system. They also happened to be offering $10 free dollars to try it out!

It’s hard to say no to free money, especially when Serve doesn’t even require any Social Security information, so I gave decided to give it shot.

One thing that I have found with many of these Peer-to-Peer payment systems is that to get market share from Paypal, typically for the first few months, these new companies will eat any costs (typically 3%) associated with funding your account with a Credit Card.   This has been true for Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, and now Serve.

As it costs them a substantial amount of money to eat these Credit Card processing costs, most companies are fast to catch on if you are abusing these systems. Therefore I don’t suggest that you try and do this every day. However if you doing a one-time transfer to yourself, you shouldn’t run into any problems.

If you want, you can read the entire FlyerTalk thread here.

There are quite a few pages, so I didn’t get a chance to read every post but it looks like as long as you AREN’T funding with an AMEX, you should earn points.

Whenever I use any of these types of Peer-to-Peer payment systems, I always transfer $1 to make sure it posting as a Cash Advance. I’ve never had that problem, but it is always better to be safe than sorry.

Serve also a has a $100 a day, $250 a month limit for funding your Serve account with your Credit Card. If you fund it with anything else, there isn’t a limit to my knowledge.

Once your account is funded, you can withdraw your money from an ATM (for a fee) or you can transfer it straight to your bank account for free.

While this isn’t like buying coins from the U.S Mint, it is $250 in free miles. Also if you are trying to meet any minimum spend requirements, this is an easy way to make a $250 dent for free.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this more than once a month because you more than likely will get flagged in their system.

It is free to fund with a Credit Card until June 2012. If you did this every month until June, that would be $1,250 in free miles.

If you are interested in signing up, as shown above there is a $10 sign up bonus. Worse case scenario is that create an account and transfer the $10 to your bank account!

More information about Serve can be found on their Facebook page and at their main website.

-Parag