ScamVictimsUnited.com

My husband loves his electronics, so he often gets gift cards to Best Buy for Christmas and birthday gifts, and he saves them up to purchase whatever new item is on his wish list. Well, today he went into a Best Buy in Richfield, Minnesota, located on 494 & Lyndale, to purchase a new VCR and firewall software, and went to pay with several gift cards that he had and the teller told him that one of them was blank. They refused to redeem it and told him that it did not exist in their system. They want my husband to produce "proof" for this card before they will activate it . . . I said, "I have it in my hand and it was in one of those gift card envelopes and it says Best Buy - $50 right on the card . . . what more proof do you need that the card exists?" The guy I was on the phone with stated that the card are out in the open, where anyone can pick them up, and I said to him "Are you trying to say that whoever gave my husband this card for a gift shoplifted it?" and he said, "Well, the card is not in our system"

My husband had to call every person who gave him a gift card, get their credit card numbers and give them to Best Buy so that they could try to cross check things to see if there was a record of this card being purchased. They called us to say that they could not find any record this way either. I asked what happens next, and they said nothing, the card is no good.

My husband then spoke with the manager and told him that this was a gift and he gave him all of the info we had. The manager said that if we could produce proof that the card was paid for, like a receipt, they could activate it, and my husband said "Who saves the receipt for a gift card that they are giving to someone else for a gift?!?" Best Buy said that if we had record on a credit card statement they could activate it, and we said "What if was paid for with cash?"

What if the cashier who rang up the gift card forgot to activate the card? The manager agreed that this could happen, and that is something that they would have to find out so that they could correct that problem, but he still was not ready to activate the card for us, so I guess that means that if the employee screws up the customer is the one who suffers.

I guess Best Buy has never heard of a thing called customer service, or a phrase that says "the customer is always right." I know that we will never shop at Best Buy again, and we are telling all of our friends and family about this also.

If there is ONE thing I am a stickler for whether it is me in need of it or giving it is CUSTOMER SERVICE and that does NOT include in any way calling the customer a Liar.

If I were you I would find out who sent him the card if possible, get a statement as to the store they bought it at and approximate date of purchase, call corporate for Best Buy and tell them that you are in the business of Scam Busting and have a lot of Media Pull, so are they going to resolve this correctly this time or are you going to take it as far as you possibly can.

Gawd ask walmart about me, they hate me at times, but what is right is right and what is wrong is wrong, if an employee messed up they need to fix it.

Remember, it is still a strong possibility that the person who gave the gift card didn't pay for it and was hoping that the recipient would be able to talk their way into getting the full value of the card.
What would happen if Best Buy didn't enforce the verification process. Do you imagine how much theft would occur then.
Who would pay for that? We all would with much higher prices.
If you like the low prices, then sometimes there's a tradeoff.
If you don't like the tradeoff then shop somewhere else where the prices are higher.

Karyn,
We know that it had to be from either Jeff's dad or brother, and they did not save the receipt; since it was for a gift card and you cannot return those they did not think that they would need it. Now both of them are checking their credit card statements to try and find a record of it that way.

In the end the manager was willing to give us 10% the entire purchase that my husband made yesterday, plus 10% off the next purchase we make until the totals of the % off equals $50. My husband spent $290 there yesterday, so that means that we would have to spend another $210 at Best Buy in order to get that total to equal the $50 gift card that he was trying to use! How nice of them to trap us into having to spend more money at their store!

How could the card not have gotten into the system?
Are there any ways a clerk could screw up and the card not get into the system?
Wouldn't you think that with the SKU scanned into the computer that it would have to register the card automatically?
The only thing I can think of is that the clerk may have scanned in another card twice. But wouldn't the computer have kicked that back out as well.
Without any explanation as to how it could happen, you have to start to think that the card was never presented to be scanned in the first place.
Isn't there the possibility that the giver thought they had it scanned and maybe it got shuffled in with other cards and never got scanned and therefore was never paid for?
If so, what is Best Buy's culpability in honoring a gift card that was never paid for in the first place?

I used to work for a major chain store and it is real easy to chg a customer on a bill esp if paid by credit card for a gift card and if the system is not that secure to double check for a card to assign it to, and the scan does not happen correctly the money was paid but the card was not credited, and thus wont show in the system.
Remember computers nor operators are NOT flawless, things can happen, just because they may seem to be something that would rarely happen they still do and the person it happens to is NOT a liar or a THIEF , they are just as baffled as to why just alongside the clerks and management.

There are also such things as magnetic purse latches and wallet latches that can demagnetize a strip on a card thus wiping out any information contained therein. I have had it happen to credit and debit cards in the past.

I VERY highly doubt that a relative would steal a card and give it as a christmas gift anyways.

Thank you Karyn for seeing my point.

My husband spoke with someone at the corporate level of Best Buy today, and within minutes they were able to find the transaction. There were three gift cards purchased on my father-in-law's credit card (onr for each son) . . . one of the numbers match the card that the oldest son was given, and we are trying to get a hold of the youngest son to see what the numbers are on his card to see if they match the ones on the transaction, but the one my husband has does not match any of the numbers on the transaction. So that is the proof that Best Buy needs . . . three gift cards were purchased by my father-in-law, and at least one of those three cards were not given to him. The person at corporate said that the clerk, either knowingly or unknowingly, must have handed Jeff's dad a card other than the ones that were scanned. (It could be a case of the clerk switched them out so they could keep the one that was activated, or it could have been an honest mistake)

Very good point.
The clerk could be the scammer.
But it seems like it would be very easy to trace back to which transaction was screwed up.
I'm glad it sounds as if Best Buy is working on fixing the problem.
From a point of purchase point of view, sometimes it seems as if they are not totally customer friendly, but when you get higher up, they always seem to do the right thing.
That's why I was hoping this wouldn't be a black mark for them.

Speaking of Best Buy and scams, last year they fired my neice, who was an assistant manager there, for falling for a scam. Somebody used a traveler's check written in Canadian dollars, so it was worth about 20-25 percent less than they gave them credit for. An honest understandable mistake, but they fired her. Several months later, though, they reconsidered and rehired her.

Actually, it is very easy to forget to swipe the gift card. Fred Meyers has those as well. I got my wife one for Christmas and was about to walk away (the clerk knows me well as I shop there alot) after paying and the clerk said "Oh, wait, come back I forgot to swipe the card in the reader"
It was crowded and the clerks where swamped, so it can happen innocently. But if she hadn't caught me, I would have given my wife a $100 card that was worthless. Many people don't know that the card has to be activated by swiping in a reader or the numbers on it manually entered into the system.

Very true, and some stores do not have a double check system on their registers to stop and prompt the cashier to swipe and activate the card.

A smaller store may not have argued as much about it, larger chains will argue til you are blue in the face and do every thing short of calling you a liar.

I can actually answer a few of the points that were brought up in this thread:

1. "The customer is always right." - That was a great idea.. Until people started abusing it. Most businesses now have assumed a stance closer to "The customer is right, but only if they're really right." And, to be frankly honest, I don't blame them. With credit card fraud, check fraud, identity fraud, etc, etc, ad nauseam on the rise... Wouldn't you set up policies to protect your business as well?

2. "Card not getting into the system" - I hate to say this, but just about everyone in this post seemed to eager to jump on the clerk for being a scammer. It could very well have been an honest mistake. As Karyn pointed out, "computers nor operators are NOT flawless." And, as a long since dead wise man once pointed out, "To err is human. To forgive, divine."

3. "Wouldn't you think that with the SKU scanned into the computer that it would have to register the card automatically?" - No. As timc said, gift cards have to be swiped through a reader or be manually entered into the system. The bar code on the card just signifies the type of card, not the exact card. That is why just about every gift card out there has a magnetic strip on them.

4. "What if the cashier who rang up the gift card forgot to activate the card?" - The manager was definitely right. Those kind of things can happen, as stated above (and elsewhere in this thread.) However, (and this is not to insult anyone) as far as the manager knows, it is a stolen card, and you're trying to get money out of it.

People in general (from the guy who doesn't return a found wallet to the guy who cuts $50,000 worth of bogus checks, or even the guy next door who just declared bankruptcy [for whatever reason] after incurring several thousand dollars worth of debt) are the cause of most of the measures people are seeing, i.e., requiring photo id to write a check or use a credit card (which more cashiers need to do), requiring a wild goose chase to activate a gift card, things like that. But, the blame does not just rest on the shoulders of the dishonest people; it also lies on the shoulders of the businesses: Credit card companies who freely handed out CC's like they were candy, just to name one example.

My personal favorite scapegoat are the "public interests" groups; the people who want this and that law passed, to protect everyone from their own stupidity. (Remember reading about the lady who sued McDonald's after she scalded herself, while driving, with a cup of hot coffee?) There is a saying, "Common sense is neither common, nor sensical." If you think about it, this covers a lot of different things. But, since I seem to have gotten off the initial subject, I'll polish this off by saying that I hope I've provided some worthwhile information to you.

Spawn

You are right, but also there are flip sides as to human error as well , or clerks not paying attention. Recently Walmart here had clerks not properly checking ID and they just got hit over christmas with 3 fake american express checks.

As I said, people make mistakes. Occasionally, people get lazy. We are human and therefore cannot be perfect. Re-read what I said in my post. I pretty well covered all aspects of human fallibility.

Spawn

Actually as for walmart, Because walmart believes in "the customer is always right" even if they are wrong, we cannot check id unless randomly prompted by the register. As stupid as it is, it is true. and as much as we want to protect the consumer we cannot, because of the few idiots who got offended when asked for id with their checks/ credit cards etc and complained to Walmart home office.

Don't blame us or say we're stupid for doing so when we're doing it because this is what the majority of customers want as stupid as it is.