App-o-rama?! You ever hear of this craziness?? Wild

[Samuel Ksiazkieicz]

Apparently I'm years behind on this craziness, but randomly I stumbled on this forum discussion the other day, actually when I was reading up on the salvage vehicle stuff.

Anyway, apparently in the mid 2000s, a group of enterprising individuals figured out that if they dropped a ton of credit card apps at the same time, the credit card companies would approve them before they realized what was going on and the hit on their credit score would be minimal. People were getting upwards of 200k of credit at a time, talking 15 or more credit cards. They would then take that credit and use the 1 year 0% balance transfers to put in a high yield savings account, which were paying over %5 back then, i.e. making 10k or more a year in interest before taxes.

haha I'm not advising for or against this, just thought it was interesting. Actually kind of surprised I didn't think of this when I was younger lol I can see myself doing something like this as a kid back in the day. Obviously this benefit is reduced now with the lower interest rates, but people are still doing it for the sign up rewards or to save money on higher priced debt like high rate credit cards or helocs.

A few links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App-o-rama
The grail of the app-o-rama peeps
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/632935/