Surprised to see these fails unless the cards were not seasoned?
If I have not used my card for a while this can happen. IME Chase texts are almost always instant and usually clear while I am still doing the transaction.
Citi is a bit of a mess. Text comes through instantly but its 50/50 whether the card will work after you reply despite the text saying otherwise. The worst is if you have to actually call Citi to get it cleared, that's a total time suck
I am skeptical about any rule being based on 505.95 being a GC number, sounds made-up to me.
Might be made up. Just thought it was weird that a Chase CSR would say that if it wasn't true. The Chase Ink had run over 10k of GC purchases in the last 2 months, so I guess it's seasoned? The Citi card was pretty new. This wasn't the first purchase on it. Payed my property taxes just fine. This was the first Gift Card attempt.
What I'm thinking about is the fact that there's so much happening all at once.
- All the cards were pulled at my local CVS where the CSR talked about rampant GC Fraud being the reason.
- The Chase CSR said a rise in GC fraud was the reason
- I got a tampered GC just 2 days ago at Walgreens
- Yesterday at one of the WMs I frequent, I was very turned off by the GC rack.
- A bunch of GCs that usually aren't carried by that WM
- For Every single one of the GCs that usually isn't carried, there were exactly 2 of them in front of the regular GCs
- Every one of them, upon close inspection, I thought the package looked like it had been "handled too much"
Maybe just something in my area. Maybe I'm just paranoid. On the other hand, it all adds up. This is the time of year when people buy the most gift cards (XMas is coming) so this is probably when the fraud ramps up. Anyone else had any experiences like this, or is it only me?