Inside the Risky, Jet-Setting World of Credit-Card Churning
You can see the globe on the card companies' dime. As always, there's a catch.
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Dan Miller lives in Cincinnati, married with six kids. The family reunion was in Lake Tahoe. Getting eight people across the country would have cost a small fortune. So he churned them there.
Miller is a credit-card churner, one of thousands of people who pry travel, cash, and other perks from credit-card rewards programs. Their common traits are a keen eye for deals and an obsessive determination not to pay when they can make somebody else pay for them. They meet up online to share strategies, including in a Reddit forum with 42,000 subscribers, double the number a year ago, and contribute to dozens of blogs on the subject.