Still is rewards which the IRS hasn’t gone after before. Slippery slope IMHO.
Not exactly but I understand your point. It’s the fact that he used the rewards to buy gift cards at a 5% discount and converted those gift cards into cash on a very large scale. If he just used points like most people do (pay down the bill, airline miles, discounts etc) it shouldn’t be income (in fact you could argue in some cases it’s just a ‘reduced interest rate’). But he figured out a multi-step process to convert points into passive income (or not so passive considering all the steps he had to take each transaction).