The Costco Chronicles: Part II – Busted 🥴

I've been hitting Costco gold pretty hard, like I'd say a lot of churners have the past year and a half. I've had success carefully creating multiple accounts (or so I thought), easily fulfilling a new 2% Gold Star Executive bonus once per 30-45 days via Groupon for a small discount on the annual fee.

With 10+ accounts eventually comes some complacency I guess, as despite having a spreadsheet in Notion with address and phone number used, I wound up getting an unexpected letter from Costco's Membership Processing department in the mail last week.

A full package delivered via UPS with a very stern letter triggered by "a recent audit". I was told that as of February 12th, all 2% rewards have been frozen and duplicate accounts disabled unless I reached out to their department by the end of the month. They also essentially threatened to give me a lifetime ban from Costco 😂.

Of course I emailed the contact given to me, Chad, who actually seemed like a super nice guy who was just doing his job. I explained, or maybe, bullshitted, my reasoning for the multiple accounts, saying I was unaware of the rules truly being enforced and that I didn't want to put my original Costco account in jeopardy. All in all, they referenced 4 of my 12 Costco accounts in the letter – no comment.

Chad agreed and closed the duplicate accounts and will be sending me the pending 2% rewards and refunds for the membership fees via check, which according to my UPS app will arrive tomorrow. All in all, I'm getting about $3,000 sent to me, with most of it being $2,500 in 2% back expedited early. 2 of the 4 accounts I had created semi-recently and was going to have to wait another 6 or so months to receive the annual rebate. While it sucks to just generally have eyes on my name and address (or, one of them 😈), it's nice to get a couple account bonuses in advance.

As I said, only 4 of my 12 accounts had been noted in the letter, each with a common denominator I won't get into, 3 of the 4 were also created in the last 6ish months, so that could be a small factor too.

No way in hell I stop buying gold but am going to pump the brakes on creating new accounts for a bit...I think.

Chad, if you're reading this, I'm sorry bro. Nothing personal.