The Frequent Miler posted that the Barclay’s shopping portal was giving 4x points/$ on purchases of American Express Gift Cards. This is in addition to the 2x points/$ that you would receive if you used your Barclays Arrival Credit Card.
I purchased $3,000 in gift cards and used the code SYNCGIFT to have the fees waived. Total including shipping was about $3,008. My points just posted on the shopping portal and it looks like they gave me points less the original gift card fees.
He also mentioned how to liquidate your Amex Cards. One of the methods I tried was liquidating using Amazon Payments. You first must add your billing info to the Amex gift card and the only way to do this is to call the number on the back of your card.
After this is done, you can add the card to Amazon Payments to make a payment to a family or friend who also has registered on Amazon Payments. The trick is that when you add the card, it puts a $1 hold on the gift card so you can’t transfer the whole $500 to someone. I have had success transferring $498 and below. Update: Thanks to Zacon in the comments for a way to avoid the $1 hold. When you enter the expiration date in Amazon Payments website, put an incorrect one at first. Then after it is saved, go back and input the correct expiration date.
Another method I tried was purchasing Vanilla Reload Cards with the Amex gift card. I can verify that it will work if you have a cashier who is willing to take a gift card as a form of payment. You just have to give them the last 4 digits of the gift card to enter into the system for it to work. Just remember since the Vanilla reloads has a $3.95 fee, you only want to load $496.05 to equal exactly $500.Vanilla Reloads can then be loaded to your Bluebird card and you can liquidate your cash this way.
Hope these updates have helped!