The bizarre “cashback” offers that paid me more than I spent

Recently I’ve been trying out a mobile rewards app called Current. The app has loads of ways to earn points, which can be exchanged for various gift cards and other rewards. I’ll probably write more about Current sometime in the future, but for now I want to focus on some strangely generous cashback offers…

Like most other reward panels, Current includes a few third-party offerwalls in addition to the existing ways to earn points on the platform. They call these “Mega Offers” (literally just the Fyber offerwall) and “Slick Offers” (which appears to be another offerwall operated by a company called ayeT-Studios)

The offers are fairly standard, including a few surveys, app downloads, quizzes, trial signups, and cashback promotions. There also seemed to be some kind of ongoing promotion unique to Current, where all offers were awarding three times the amount of points. – I’m not sure whether this was actually a time-limited promotion, or if the base number of points was just set really low with a “bonus” to make up for it, but it was certainly interesting

While scrolling through some of the available offers, I noticed quite a few in-app purchase cashbacks. Basically you’d have to download an app from the Google Play Store, make any kind of in-app purchase, and then be rewarded with points that would usually be worth less than the actual purchase amount. But due to the promotion, they were offering more.

A $20 PayPal “gift card” is equal to 39,950 Current points, which gave me an exchange rate of roughly $1 per 2000 points. All the payments for in-app purchases are handled by Google directly through the Play Store, meaning there was no way for my card to be charged any more than the purchase amount I agreed to. So I got to work completing as many of these offers as I could, where the reward in points was greater than the cheapest available purchase.

Overall my in-app purchases totalled $16.34 AUD (~$12.65 USD), and I earned a total of 43,605 points – equivalent to $21.80 USD from cashback offers alone, not including all the other points I was able to earn. I’ve since redeemed the $20 PayPal reward twice, each time taking around 3-4 days to appear in my PayPal account.

My experience with Current so far has otherwise been pretty positive – there’s a nice variety of ways to earn money including their flagship music feature, which streams internet radio in the background and rewards you a few points for every minute you listen. I’m still not sure why those cashback offers were even available in the first place, but they’re a welcome addition!

If you want to download Current, please consider using my referral link. This gives me 500 bonus points as soon as you play your first song using the music feature. I’m not otherwise affiliated with Current, but using referral links are a great way to support my blog if you enjoy the content <3