To Good to be True Credit Card Offer?

Recently I received an offer to sign up for an Upgrade Credit Card, with a $500 welcome bonus for signing up and completing a few debit card transactions. I had never heard of Upgrade, and, after a bit of digging, the offer was indeed too good to be true.

I always search online for any offers one may want to take advantage of and find if there are any data points with regards to people not receiving their Welcome offer, issues signing up, etc.

Red Flags To Look for

Too Many Different Offers: The offer I received looks similar to an offer given in May of 2022, but there appeared to be new offers of varying amounts almost weekly for most of 2022.

Non-Standard Signup : For all the Upgrade accounts, you are asked to “Get your own personal credit line to pay for purchases or fund your bank account”.Opening a line of credit line is not a standard when applying for new credit card.

Negative Experience Posts : If you look online and there are many negative experiences about the signup offer, stay away.

Researching potential issues

For this particular welcome offer, for Upgrade, there were several data points from users on popular credit card sites, including:

• users denied being able to signup even though they more than qualify
• denied the welcome offers
• changing the welcome offer amounts ($500 welcome offer to $100)
• no notice on account closures
• un-responsive customer service when asking about a variety of issues
• the list goes on and on

Suggestions

Use the above information in this post to vet. Any offer that seems to be good to be true.