Originally Posted by gloreglabert

Here's a long-winded but relevant cautionary tale for all your folks. It's from last night, actually.

I keep pretty meticulous records of all my financial activities, including churn type stuff. I use a program similar to Quicken to track all of my bank accounts, CC's, prepaid cards, and gift cards, and make an entry every time I load a prepaid card, then pair up the loads with the CC charges once they post to my accounts. The net result is a constant turnover of positive reload transactions (i.e., +500 to BB) that are simply awaiting the corresponding -503.95 or whatever to show up on my CC.

Last night I was reconciling my transactions and found myself in a bad situation -- one of my CC's posted a $496 VR charge for which I didn't have a corresponding card load. Double checked all ~15 of my prepaid cards against my records and confirmed that yes, there was a single VR that was missing. Crap.

Luckily, because it was an odd reload amount (I've started mixing up the amounts lately), I was able to determine the date of the missing VR purchase, on which I bought 4 VR's in 2 txns at the same CVS. So I open up my gallon-sized ziploc of saved receipts and dig through for the 2 receipts from that night. I can only find one of them...I probably threw out the other one out of carelessness. Next I go pull out my drawer full of several hundred used VR's and go through the whole mess of them until I locate the two VR's indicated on the receipt by the barcode ID number. Tried to load, both already redeemed. Call Incomm out of frustration, they tell me I'm SOL without the physical card. Crap again.

But I did notice that the serial numbers on the two VR's I pulled out were sequential, which meant that maybe the two other VR's from that night were just before or after (assuming I pulled all four from the same rack). So I dig through my hundreds of VR's again (needle in a haystack...) and pull out every card with a serial number less than 50 or so away from the serials of the two VR's I've got. That ends up being a pretty sizable stack, since it's from my regular CVS and I buy from them all the time.

Next I fire up VR.com and start punching in the numbers...redeemed, redeemed, redeemed, ad nauseum. Every so often the site blocks me for exceeding "velocity checks" and I have to tether to my phone or VPN to change my IP and keep checking.

About 30 attempts in, I finally get a hit...never been so happy to see a terms and conditions agreement window before. Apparently I'd tossed the card in my used bin before actually loading the thing, which is easy enough to do when you're loading en masse...FWIW, the serial number of the 'winning' card ended up being 21 away from the other two I had. Start to finish, the process of recovering the card took about 5 hours.

Anyhow, a couple things occurred to me from this experience: I was only able to detect the 'lost' card because I was keeping detailed records in the first place (since otherwise I just would've been $500 poorer and not even realized it), and I was only able to recover the lost card because I kept both receipts and 'used' cards. Even then, I'd still say I got lucky in actually finding the live one in my card graveyard.