Originally Posted by
bfwolf
A piece of advice, which may have been obvious to most people: if you buy a gift card where the PIN is the last 4 digits of the card, change it immediately to something only you would know.
A $500 VGC from giftcardmall.com fell out of my pocket, and I had not changed the PIN. When I called customer service, they were generally unhelpful. It took 5 days of repeated phone calls/emails/faxes before I finally got the card closed down. By that point all but $26 had been spent on it. Fortunately, I was able to show that I had reported the card right away and they sent me a $500 replacement card. But if I had changed the PIN, I wouldn't have spent a couple of weeks beating myself up for potentially losing $500.
The card does NOT need PIN to be drained. It works perfectly fine without PIN as a Credit Card just so you know.
Whether you changed the PIN or not, does not make any difference if you have not discovered the card is lost and immediately reported the loss /or stolen.
The advice is to always treat this as cash, and carry such accordingly. Would you easily let $500 cash fell out of your pocket? That is the point.