Rakuten’s 100% Rebate Trick Lets You Buy Hyatt, United, or Alaska Miles for Just 1 Cent Each—Plus 5,000 Bonus Points

by Gary Leff

The Rakuten shopping portal has a 100% rebate on Incogni subscriptions. What does Incogni do? You don’t actually care (but I’ll tell you below).

  • New Rakuten members referred by an existing member get $50 after they spend $50.

  • You’ll spend your preferred amount with Incogni.

  • And you can choose to earn Amex Membership Rewards or Bilt Rewards points instead of Cash Back.

Put a different way, you can buy Amex or Bilt points at 1 cent apiece plus new members pick up 5,000 points on top. Purchases made through Rakuten now should all transfer at 1:1 to Bilt in May (Bilt has only committed on 1:1 transfers from Rakuten for elite members of their program after that).

I did this with Bilt. This is a way to buy Alaska Airlines, United, or Hyatt miles at 1 cent apiece which is phenomenal – or, of course, and of their other transfer partners:

  • Star Alliance: Air Canada Aeroplan, Turkish Miles & Smiles, United Airlines MileagePlus, Avianca LifeMiles, TAP Air Portugal Miles&Go
  • oneworld: Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan, Iberia Plus, British Airways Club, Japan Airlines Mileage Bank, Qatar Airways Privilege Club
  • SkyTeam: Air France KLM Flying Blue, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
  • Non-alliance: Emirates Skywards, Southwest Airlines, Aer Lingus Aer Club, Etihad Guest, Spirit Airlines Free Spirit
  • Hotels: World Of Hyatt, IHG One Rewards, Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton Honors, Accor ALL – Accor Live Limitless

And of course it becomes an even better deal with Bilt Rent Day transfer bonuses (up to 100% for Platinum members, plus 25% buy up available with Bilt Cash).

So what is Incogni? It automates requests to have data brokers and people search sites remove your personal information. Maybe you care about this, and getting the service free is a bonus. Maybe not. Here’s what you do:

  1. Sign up for Rakuten if you haven’t already.

  2. Search for Incogni and see the 100% rebate offer.

  3. Choose the plan you want – give me the most expensive one, please and thank you.

  4. Complete the purchase. You give them an email address and credit card. They don’t even make you give them your address before paying.

  5. Cancel auto-renewal by just ‘cancelling your subscription’. You don’t even need to set a calendar reminder.

    This opportunity is only available to new Incogni users on the first payment of their subscription plan. You should see the transaction logged in Rakuten right away:

    Rakuten says the actual cash back amount should reflect in their system same day.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. I hope this article brings in more money in clicks than the $22 in points you will buy from this “deal”.

  3. @Paul — the plans themselves are 55% with code RAKUTEN but one could make the argument not to use the code in this case since you get 100% back on whatever you spend (new users only)

  4. 22 points? Not worth the clicks. Maybe if I had a non-user of Rakuten I could refer for the 5,000 bonus.

  8. Incogni did a great job of scrubbing my data from google searches etc. Of course it is always whack a mole with data brokers but there is some value in making it more difficult for stalkers and scammers to find you and family members. Unfortunately this offer is only good for NEW accounts, but we all have multiple email addresses and P2 credit cards, no?

  9. You’re not buying points. lol. You’re buying a subscription based service. BILT must be getting desperate with all the shilling lately.

  10. “BILT must be getting desperate with all the shilling lately.”

    This has nothing to do with Bilt.

  11. You’re getting a year of a subscription based service for free (if you think of it as purchasing points at $0.01 each). You just turn off auto renew and you get rid of the subscription part.
    I don’t know why there’s so much hate here. I’m sure every one of us can get far more than 1 cent per point value. AND you’re getting this service for a year as an added bonus.

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