The Great Gift Card Fiasco

I would say that by "laundering" the first two cards, BD could claim that you suspected they weren't right to begin with. If I were a betting man, I would say that, unless your time and energy is worth nothing, you've already put more energy into this than the cost of the cards (I'm assuming you paid less than the $700 face value), I suspect you'll lose this battle.

But Empress, they did give BD money- in the form of two gift cards from BD, redeemed to buy a new gift card. That new gift card, not the originals, was then zeroed out arbitrarily, and apparently under the claim that the original cards were obtained fraudulently. Which... that's really up to BD to enforce at the time of purchase. If the original GC numbers were used online to purchase a new card, then within seconds- or at most minutes- they should have notification if it was an already used card, or fraudulently created- and should have been able to notify anonymous about their rejected purchase. That they didn't implies that BD didn't realize, or mistakenly believes, that the GCs at the time anonymous used them are retroactively invalid. I suspect more likely that someone attempted to reuse the original GC numbers later, and BD's system flagged them as invalid- and then canceled all purchases made with those cards, including ones that had been made when they were still valid, such as the consolidated gift card. For anonymous: I wasn't clear, but did they give any indication of when the card was zeroed out? I.e., you didn't notice for months, but did they not catch the alleged fraud on the original two cards until months later, or did they catch it right away and you just didn't notice because you didn't use the card until the fall? Also, it's not clear why you're reluctant to accuse the ebay seller(s) of possible fraud: do they have stellar ratings, and a solid track record? As for steps to take, this is classically where corporations have people over the barrel: the amount is big enough that you care, but too small for it to be worth your bringing in a lot of legal weight- and even if you did, their in-house counsel will always out gun you as an individual. So one tactic is: Have you shopped with BD before? I think if you as individuals have a purchasing history with BD, you should bring that to bear with this "executive customer service" contact you mentioned. Pointing out that you have purchased other things from BD using your own CCs, and are feeling that BD has ripped you off by stealing your $700 when you used two gift cards to buy a single one, and therefore will never shop there again. Unlike Empress, I feel that regardless of the validity of the original cards, once they accepted those cards to pay for a new card, it's on them if they turned out fraudulent. However, you can't really sway them with logic or even the law, only with the weight of "You are losing an existing customer for life- is that worth $700 to BD?".

IANAL, TINLA. And I'm sorry, but it sounds like a case of caveat emptor to me. Look at it this way - say your wife innocently bought a stolen crock-pot at a tag sale, then ultimately decided it was too small; but then she saw that said crock-pot had a mocked-up "gift receipt" inside that looked real. Your wife used the "gift receipt" to exchange it for another crock-pot, and the clerk wasn't paying attention and let her trade it in. Then a month later the manager of the store studied the receipt more closely and saw it was faked, and called you to pay for the new crock-pot. From your perspective, yes, you were an innocent party -- but from the store's perspective, you used a faked receipt to trade one crockpot for another, and so you still got something from them for free. So trying to get money out of the store doesn't make any sense -- instead, you need to be trying to get money back from the person who had the tag sale. You didn't actually give BD any money. Yes, it's bad customer service on their part, but the courts aren't going to be looking at "bad customer service", they're going to be looking at who gave money to whom. And you didn't give BD any money, so they don't owe you any that I can see.

But Empress, they did give BD money- in the form of two gift cards from BD, redeemed to buy a new gift card. Not if those two gift cards were stolen FROM BD; then it's "using stolen merchandise to get other merchandise." I'll grant that if THAT is the problem, Bloomingdale's could have been better at communicating that. But Bloomingdales did say that at least one of those cards was "compromised", which sounds an awful lot like they may have been originally stolen or obtained illegally.

Check with your State's Attorney office locally, and find out if there are other similar cases first. They may already have a contact and a work through for this.

Have you reached out to the ebay sellers and asked them to reach out to Bloomingdale's to resolve this? Wouldn't they have a paper trail of who gave them the card? Assuming that they're not laundering money here and are operating legitimately, they should help you out. The only thing is that they may no longer have paperwork from a year ago. I would do this and what http://ask.metafilter.com/204766/The-Great-Gift-Card-Fiasco#2951752 says above.

splitting and combining gift cards isn't of itself that big a deal, as it is done for convenience (add all the $5 Starbucks cards you got for Christmas to your gold card balance) and regifting on a regular basis. The Starbucks card management site has a handy online utility for doing so. I expect they are essentially shooting straight with you. I don't find it at all hard to believe that both cards were bought with hot CCs, possibly even without the knowledge of that seller (although I wouldn't buy from them again, because frankly, I doubt it). I do e-commerce for a living, and the security seminars I've attended have demonstrated that there is a vast underground CC "market," and laundering them by buying gift cards is a prime method for use. I used to have a gift certificate option on one of my stores, and the fraudsters headed that way like bees to flowers. Let's face it, you may have gotten the angle wrong, but you suspected fraud of another type when you combined the cards. You knew the sellers were possibly not legit. Why are you going to assume that Bloomingdale's is at fault, and why would you expect them to eat it? I'd say you bought $700 (less the discount) worth of experience.

http://www.allthingsgiftcard.com/2007/10/top-five-gift-card-scams-on-ebay/ I think your wife walked straight into the middle of a common credit card scam on eBay, maybe on one gift card, maybe on both. Your wife was clearly aware of the risk of a fraud, but she didn't recognise that the fraud might not only be against her, but also against Bloomingdales. From Bloomingdale's perspective she looks absolutely complicit in the scam. I would take this up with PayPal/Ebay, but I'd have low expectations of seeing the $630 again.

This may be not be do-able, but could you do a charge-back on the credit card that you used to buy these two non-working gift cards? I mean, it sounds like you didn't get what you were supposed to receive... Assuming a CC was used, the limit of time to do a charge back is 6 months.