I’ve been saving all my VGC for YEARS now and there’s a stack of shoe boxes with VGC’s and also 3rd party GC’s. One day I decided that it’s time to toss them out, but before I threw them out, I had this bright idea to check their balance before tossing them. I considered finding a Coke machine and trying to swipe the cards there, but there wasn’t a nearby one. Then someone suggested I try Intuit Quickbooks payments. It’s meant for small businesses to run credit cards.
I signed up and they mailed me a free bluetooth credit card reader. It’s pretty easy to use – download an app, turn on the reader, swipe the credit card and that’s it. I think for the first week, I swiped about 10 VGC a day. Eventually I moved up to about 2 dozen cards a day or so. I think I went through an entire shoe box of them and guess how much money I found on them….. ABSOLUTELY ZERO!
Discouraged, I stopped for about a year. Then a month ago, I started back up again. This time, I got impatient and ran about 50 cards or so in a day. I think the last 5 cards were rebate cards with my name on them. Eventually, I got an error on the app. Then the next day, I got this email:
So that was that. I’ve now decided it’s not worth my time to continue swiping all these “empty” VGC because a) some of these have already expired and b) most VGC have dormancy fees and it’s been so many months that those fees would have wiped out the balance by now. I’m going to toss them all out.
I did this, had hundreds in boxes. I ran them all through square and found one with a few dollars and one with $150. No idea how. But they didn’t axe me. YMMV
Hi Vinh,
Will you be participating in the Morgan and Peace silver dollar proof coins in August or the reverse proof sets in November?
Thanks,
Jeff
interesting, thanks for sharing. i have also been thinking about this, as i have thousands of old cards sitting in amazon boxes. i’m paranoid that i’d be throwing away a $500 or a $200. thought about paying one of my children to check them, but i’m also close to certain that we’d find zero…what if, though…
EXACTLY my train of thought, but unlike say a Best Buy gift card where there was a possiblity your order got cancelled and money returned to the GC, a VGC you most likely liquidated at a store and the likelihood that they refunded you back to the VGC is near zero. Now the VGC that you used to buy stuff online…then possible there is money there in case an order was canned, etc.
But like I said, I ran through 2 boxes and got $0. Plus the monthly fees likely wiped out any remaining balances.