GiftCardMall Visa Gift Card Design Changes
About a month ago I wrote about an opportunity to purchase Visa gift cards at GiftCardMall. While GiftCardMall has sold Visa gift cards for quite a long time, most of the time the fees are too high to justify buying them. That changed with the re-introduction of cashback from portals.
Currently both Simply Best Coupons and Top Cashback (personal referral link) are paying .5% (.005) for the purchase of Visa gift cards. (More portals here) This payout is based on the face value of the cards, so for example a $500 gift card earns $2.50 in cashback. You can find the full math of the deal along with all of the details here.
The Advantages of GiftCardMall Visas & Recent Negative Changes
At the time of my original post, I pointed out that Visa gift cards from GiftCardMall have two key advantages. The first is that they print your name on the cards. This is advantageous since it helps when using them at stores that like to check id. Secondly, many of the designs don’t didn’t have the word “Gift” or “Gift Card” on them.
Unfortunately it seems that GiftCardMall changed their mind about leaving out the word “Gift”, so they decided to alter their designs. I first heard rumblings of this a few weeks ago in regards to the rubber ducky design that I normally order.
On their website the Rubber Ducky Design looks like this (Keep in mind the words “Gift Card Recipeint” are replaced with the recipient’s name):
Unfortunately the cards are being sent out like this (Thanks to Travel with Grant for the photo):
To test things out further, on my last order I bought a different card design. Here is the design I ordered as shown on their website:
And here is the gift card I received:
If you look closely, they snuck in the word gift, although it is much less obvious than in the rubber ducky design. With that said, it is strategically placed directly below the recipient’s name. GiftCardMall is clearly trying to make it obvious that these are gift cards.
My Hypothesis
In both of these cases, the words “Gift” are printed on the cards in the same way as the name and numbers. I believe that GiftCardMall already has these designs sitting around and in an effort not to waste them by printing up new ones with “Gift” incorporated, they are adding on the word “Gift” after the fact.
Order Cancellations
Over the past week many people have written in about having their orders cancelled by GiftCardMall. GCM has always had very strict fraud prevention, but it seems orders are being cancelled much more regularly than before.
It is my suggestion that it is probably a good idea to use this as a supplemental form of purchasing gift cards. It is also probably wise to start small and work your way up. I don’t know why exactly they are cancelling orders or how to avoid that other than to say they are more comfortable with customers who have been purchasing for awhile.
Conclusion
This development isn’t the end of the world, however it does make it more difficult for people trying to use these cards at places that don’t allow gift cards. There are many designs available and I have personally ordered a few of them to conduct further tests. Have you found any designs that do not have the word “Gift” printed on them? Let us know in the comments.
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Giftcardmall.com only has $250 VGC as of this morning 6/10/15?!?!?!?!? WTF….. NO……
And they jacked the fee up to $5.95! This door is slammed shut. No wonder they were cancelling so many orders recently. Bet they’ll let us buy as many as we want now…
I tried buying VGC on Giftcardmall using the topcashback portal. The first thing TCB asked me was for details of my bank account (I mostly buy AGC from TCB and withdraw money through PayPal) saying that the merchant (GCM) requires I have bank account info with TCB.
Just tried shopping through TopCashback to GiftCardMall and got this message
“This merchant requires you to have entered valid bank details (Direct Deposit) in your Top Cashback account before continuing.”
Anyone else experience this?
bought 2k a hour ago still no cancellation email . Was my first purchase with them ! When should I expect them to ship out ?
It can take up to a week for them to ship the cards.
I ordered $3000 last month, no problem. Used them to load at Target with pin, the cashier never touched the cards. Worked great.
Ordered $3000 more early this week with a different Chase card, just received the notification that they shipped. Will try to load Red Card as soon as I get and activate them. I only did loads $1000 at a time ($500 x 2) with different cashiers.
I know all about Cancellations ugh! My cards do all have Gift in the top left corner ($500 denoms eachx6).
However, my first purchase was for $3000…they didn’t check call or cancel anything and neither did Citi. And it was my first purchase on the card…now it’s just flooded with grocery store purchases lol! My other orders were all canceled from as little as $200 to as much as $2500. In total, over $9,000 cancelled and only $3,000 approved.
Quinton-
Were you charged cash advance fees by Citi for these GCs? I’ve held off buying GCs with Citi cards by I’d heard that Citi codes them as cash advances.
I was not! I was worried about this myself, and my statement just closed and posted. No fees!
I am off work today so I went to Target to load Redcard. It had no problem even with big gift card sign. The problem is that when I came back home trying to buy more on GCM. I got cancelled 5 times! I am a return customer starting to buy $200 gc since May 6th. First email came after less than 1hr I placed order today. I tried $400, 2×500, 4x$500 and $500 with different email/name but billing address as same as shipping address. they were all cancelled no matter how much is the value.
Shawn, is there any other website selling gc? Simon mall transfered me to gcm website. it seems not work neither.
Thanks
I also bought the one in your second example (non-duck). It has gift under the name, but it’s less obvious than most of the other options.
Easy fix for the ducky card: put a little sticker over the word “gift” with your name or s/t else on it. Only the nastiest cashier would make an issue over that.