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Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

Hard to avoid the appearance that they:

* paid $1000+ per "small business" acquired in early 2021 (those were some sweet signup bonuses over on the travel blogs!)

* raised $700M+ cash in Apr + Oct 2021, and negotiated a higher price per share by adding a slide showing exponentially more "small businesses" on board

* got them all offboard once the accounts no longer had value

This feels a little conspiracy-theory'y. I guess you would want to validate this view by

* waiting until the recession has started and finished

* watching for them to pivot and re-onboard this customer base again with more sweet offers

* expecting them to be in the middle of another funding round when the deals come back

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Wait $1k per? I bet half or more of those "small businesses" are just people getting the bonus.

Not only that, but the deal terms and conditions quite explicitly didn't include industry-standard rules limiting bonuses to one per person... many many many people got multiples.

THAT starts to sound suspiciously like intentionally encouraging multiple signups to juice numbers. Shades of the dollar coin fiasco again.

I don't know... If I had to guess, this sounds more like incompetence than malice to me.

Not a chance. Even at scrappy startups, these offers are carefully evaluated by lawyers to comply with necessary laws. There’s no way their lawyers looked at this and just sort of forgot to catch the lack of a “one per customer” clause.

It’s not really malice, though. They simply wanted to buy their way to the maximum number of signups they could get, and paying customers to sign up is the easy button to do that. Removing the limit for multiple signups will take it even further.

It almost sounds like brex took a page from Bre-X¹ !

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bre-X

And now they’re trying Brex-it.

The credit cards points blogs and forums are ruthless about abusing any signup bonuses and loopholes that can be found. The amount of outright fraud being encouraged on the forums (though not the front page of most blogs) is eye-opening to anyone who ever thought you could trust your users to do the right (or even legal) thing.

In cases like this, though, it seems clear that Brex was abusing the abusers: They knew the signup bonuses would create a signup frenzy and likely viewed it as buying their way to the numbers they needed for the next funding round.

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