[Reposting 11//6/19 as these official terms recently went into effect. Again, it’s likely nothing has changed in practice.]
Citi Double Cash released an update on the terms of the cards. The new terms exclude gift card loads from earning cashback. It also excludes person-to-person payments, as well as lottery tickets and gambling.
Old Terms:
Eligible purchases do not include balance transfers, cash advances, convenience checks, disputed or unauthorized purchases/fraudulent transactions, Card Account fees and finance charges and fees for services or programs you elect to receive through us.
New Terms (will go into effect on November 1, 2019):
The following transactions are not purchases and will not earn cash rewards: balance transfers, cash advances, checks that access your Card Account, items returned for credit, disputed or unauthorized purchases, fraudulent transactions, traveler’s checks, foreign currency purchases, money orders, wire transfers (and similar cash-like transactions), lottery tickets and gaming chips (and similar betting transactions), loads or reloads of balances on gift cards or prepaid cards or cash equivalents, person-to-person payments, Citi Flex Loans, the creation of Citi Flex Pays, Card Account fees and charges (such as late fees and finance charges), and fees for services or programs you elect to receive through us.
Checking the terms on the Prestige card, for example, I don’t see the gift card exclusion (though it does show some of the other additions like lottery tickets and gaming chips). They’ll likely roll this out to other cards slowly, and it may already be showing on some others or in other updates.
I just want to stress something here, similar to what we wrote recently regarding the Amex terms: I don’t think anything is changing now in practice. This is just an updated terms which means that they have their backs covered in case they decide to enforce such a thing for a given person or decide to start enforcing it in the future.
The terms may imply that even third party gift cards, such as Amazon gift cards, won’t earn points. Again, in practice I expect all these things to earn rewards.
There are also some other updates noted in the upcoming Double Cash changes regarding account reinstatement and in scenarios where minimum payment was not met, read the details here.
Hat tip to reader Chong786
