I have a couple temporary Serve cards that have an initial funding of $500. I was hoping to use one or both of these to load a registered Serve at WM.

I went to the MC tonight and they didn’t seem familiar with Serve, but offered to try to load it. I swiped my activated Serve, told them I wanted to load $500 on it, and then when prompted, slid one of my temporary Serves. I didn’t see any errors, but the MC employee said that this card could not be used, and I needed to enter a PIN. I didn’t see a prompt to enter a PIN, so I was confused by this. The cashier said I’d need to cancel out the transaction, and the moment I hit Cancel, I saw an option for Debit.

I thought about pressing Debit to see what would happen, but I didn’t want to do anything that seemed like I was being non-compliant, so we ended up cancelling the transaction and I thanked the employee and left.

This reminded me of some things I’ve read previously about quickly hitting Cancel and then selecting Debit, but I wasn’t sure if that only applied to certain gift cards or if that also applies to loading from a Serve card.

Am I on the right track here? What am I missing?

I currently only have 1 activated card, so if this method does not end up working out, I plan to activate my temporary Serves slowly to avoid hitting the velocity limit.

Thanks!