After learning about the the possible savings, I finally decided to give the gift card exchange site a try last December. I bought two $50 gift cards, one for a restaurant, and another for Jamba Juice.
About a week later, the physical cards arrived in the mail. (Separately tho, because they came from different sellers.) I used the restaurant gift card to treat my mother to a dinner at the restaurant, and had a little balance left afterwards. I also got myself a cup of smoothie from Jamba Juice, mostly to make sure that all balance was there. I was pretty satisfied with the savings, even thought I might get more gift cards through their service again after I use up the ones I had.
Well, I didn't go to Jamba Juice again after the first use, mostly because it was cold and I wasn't in the mood for a frozen fruit smoothie.
I recently went to Jamba Juice, put in an order for a cup of juice and handed the cashier my gift card. She ran it and told me that there was no balance left. I was really surprised, told her I only used my $50 balance on one cup of drink, so she ran it for me again, and she confirmed that there was no money left in the card. I paid for the drink with my credit card and the cashier told me to call the number on the back of the card because those people could look up transaction history of this particular card for me.
After I came home, starting to get a little panicked, I gave Jamba Juice (or the company that runs the gift card service for them) a call. They looked it up for me, and told me that about a month after I first used the gift card on that one cup of drink, the remaining balance of forty something was used all at once at a location in some city, far away from where I live and have never been to. After I explained my situation to them, the customer service rep told me that since I didn't get the card directly from them, he is not sure if they can do anything for me, but they would look into the matter and get back to me at a later date.
Next, I looked up the number for raise.com, where I got my gift card from. I spoke to the Raise customer service guy and they are going to issue a refund of the amount for the amount of money I spent for the gift card (not the value of the gift card itself) back to me. Lucky me they have a 1 year guarantee which sorta helped, but I still felt like somebody was able to take my money right out of my wallet, despite the fact that I have the gift card in my possession at all time and I didn't really like that feeling at all.
By the way, both the gift cards had the silver thingy that supposed to conceal PIN number scratched off at the time I received it. Although I can't be absolutely sure (because I didn't keep the envelope the cards came in,) the city that that somebody used up all the balance on my card was in a very close proximity to the address I remembered seeing on the envelope. I supposed what happened was that the seller kept a copy of the card number and PIN number with he/she, waited a while to make sure that the buyer had a chance to check that the balance was there, and then go back to the store at a later date with all the info, saying that they lost the physical card and asked for a new card or to use the remaining balance on their own purchase.
I looked up reviews of raise.com afterward and saw that there are some reviewers who had exactly same experience as I did.
Moral of the story: Despite the potential savings for the dollar value on the card, I think the system is a scammer heaven. Although the purchase is covered by the web-site's guarantee, I don't think they've done enough to prevent this from happening (or perhaps the gift card system just has too many holes) and I also think the sites should inform buyers of the risk that they are about to get themselves into before they make their purchasing decision. As for me, I probably won't be getting a gift card through these services again because the risk doesn't worth the savings and the time I have to spend on the phone waiting and speaking with the customer service.
If you have some of those in your wallet right now, may be try to check and see if all the balance is still there and perhaps plan to use it soon. And if you want to get those gift cards anyway, try to use it as soon as you receive the card, or see if you can exchange it for a new card of your own (although I heard the store won''t allow you do it tho.)
March 23, 2017 at 03:08PM
