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Amazon eGift cards purchased at bestbuy.com in December 2024 may not work $200

1,288 1,323 March 1, 2025 at 10:28 AM in Flowers & Gifts (4) Get Best Buy coupons
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+34
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$200.00

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Last Edited by everestsun March 23, 2025 at 03:18 PM
$200.00
+34 Deal Score
20,340 Views
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/amaz...Id=6545179

If you have purchased Amazon eGift cards from bestbuy.com in December of 2024 and have not redeemed them yet, please redeem them as soon as possible.

I have purchased $250 Amazon eGift cards ($50+$200) from bestbuy.com in December of 2024 when Paypal had a reward promotion. Many SDers may have done the same as the deal was in the front page of SD.

While the $50 card was redeemed successfully at Amazon in January, my $200 card redemption attempt last week gave me an error message that it has been already redeemed in another account. Since this is an eGift card not physical card and I have never shared the code with anyone and Best Buy does not include the code in the email, the code was most likely compromised from the servers or stolen by the workers of Amazon or Best Buy.

I have been communicating with both Best Buy and Amazon for a week, neither of them provided any help. They simply asked me to talk to the other party. Best Buy said that they have no visibility of Amazon eGift card status. Amazon not only refused to send a replacement but also refused to provide redemption date. I am working with Chase Visa card to dispute the charge and push Best Buy to contact Amazon on my behalf.

If you find your Amazon eGift cards purchased from bestbuy.com were also compromised, please push Best Buy to contact Amazon on your behalf. Amazon ticket support team only copied and pasted the scripted nonsense. They never answered my questions.

I used to think eGift cards are safer as thieves can't steal them in store. That is not the case with Amazon eGift cards. From my interaction with them this time, I found it is actually harder to get Amazon to help with eGift card issues, perhaps because they cannot blame on store thieves.

Latest response from Amazon on 3/1/2025:
--- Upon checking, this gift card has been claimed and used by someone other than the intended recipient.
I'm not able to resend the gift card or refund the order.
For confidentiality reasons, I'm unable to explain further about the gift card claimed account or when it was claimed.
---

Update 3/22/2025: Chase has closed the dispute and credited me $200. A lesson learned:
Do not buy eGift cards from Best Buy unless you redeem them immediately. As I mentioned in my post in detail, Best Buy has a very serious security hole in their eGift card delivery process that they do not require account login or email access in order to display the code on the screen.

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Joined Jan 2006
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> bubble2 3,266 Posts
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jneset
03-02-2025 at 04:21 PM.
03-02-2025 at 04:21 PM.
Customer most certainly is not always right anymore.
Such a bad situation nowadays with corporate always just waving it off as consumer protections prohibiting them from helping.
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Joined Dec 2019
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LivelyKestrel847
03-02-2025 at 05:17 PM.
03-02-2025 at 05:17 PM.
I had this happen with an Apple gift card from target,… someone stole it before I got to use it… , neither the card sender-hired by target nor Target would accept responsibility. therefore I never bought anymore gift cards from target. Lately I'm not so hot on gift cards especially by email, Target sucks for this and other reasons., yeah don't shop there
1
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Joined Dec 2006
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CalMan
03-02-2025 at 06:26 PM.
03-02-2025 at 06:26 PM.
I feel for ya and that's ALOT of money to take a loss on. If misery loves company, I had a similar ordeal with Taco Bell gift cards I purchased on Amazon. Now where are incidents don't meet is the value was never LOST, but...

If you'll recall a couple years ago Taco Bell changed the way to login in to the app and website. They send you an email link. Well, I had proactively saved the gift cards successfully to my Taco Bell account and proactively checked they were still there every couple of months (I don't eat out often), but they disappeared after the login change and dealing their CS is just as horrid. CS would send me to Gift Cards and back and forth. I gave up. It was only 2 @ $25. but Amazon CS was able to give me the both the Serial # and PIN for each. All I could do with Taco Bell was have them go dormant. Might try again, but doubt.

I wish you success in your goals.
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Joined Oct 2017
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UKR_12
03-03-2025 at 07:43 AM.
03-03-2025 at 07:43 AM.
I had a similar situation with Office Depot about 9 years ago. I was given a $300 gift card purchased from Groupon, but when I tried to use it, it was empty. However, Office Depot was able to trace exactly when and where it was redeemed, it turned out to be in a different state, 800 miles away. They replaced the card within 1 week without any problems. Amazon could do the same, but they just aren't willing to. Best Buy is the worst; I suspect the card was probably leaked and stolen by their employees. I stopped dealing with Best Buy after experiencing their horrible and absolutely unhelpful customer support. I've had so many issues with Best Buy that I've lost count.
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misel00
03-03-2025 at 02:19 PM.
03-03-2025 at 02:19 PM.
Quote from everestsun :
I went through Amazon customer service route asking when my eGift card was redeemed, they refused to provide that even after I sent in the proof that I am the purchaser of the eGift card. Then I sent an email to Amazon CEO's office asking for redemption date again. As I read online, that email used to be processed by a different team a year ago. But it turned out not anymore. I did receive a response, but unfortunately the response was from the same outsourced regular customer service. Here is what it says:

--- Upon checking, this gift card has been claimed and used by someone other than the intended recipient.
I'm not able to resend the gift card or refund the order.
For confidentiality reasons, I'm unable to explain further about the gift card claimed account or when it was claimed
. ---

This is very odd. From what I read on Reddit and other sites, previously Amazon usually shared the redemption date with the gift card purchaser though they did not reveal which account. When I had issues with other gift cards such as Walmart and Wholefoods, I was always provided with the redemption/usage date information. Why would Amazon want to hide redemption date now?

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 states that I have the right to be informed. It appears that 2025 is the year that rich people and rich enterprises can be above the law.

Don't even think they will do anything for you, trust me, they are told to just say NO and repeat the same nonsense when you email them, does not matter where you send the email it will all go back to the same overseas group but they will call them selves something else. how do I know? I was screwed by them out of $500 in them sending me worthless amazon gift cards by THEM!!! that should have taken 1-2 days to fix, NOPE.. no one could care less, they tried to tell me the g/cards were used but all of them were not even activated by guess who,, Amazon directly. I took about 4 weeks and dozens of emails , calls, hours, etc, applying all sorts of external pressure on them and then they barely took care of it. They could care less and if you do a c/back there system is programmed to close your account(most will not car ebut if you have your whole eco system(data, photos. etc) in prime then your sh*t out of luck!).. Nice company, pure cr*p! Trust me , don't bother with Amazon your going to just be told to pound sand over and over. i would bark up the tree of best buy but there C/S has gone to sh*t also the past 2 years and it's terrible as well! Amazon thinks they are doing you a favor when you buy something from them now! Here is another thing they did to me during the holidays , they delivered my $350 item to the wrong address, I had photos of where the amazon worker delivered it to from when they took the delivery photo and legit photos of my place on my account. the two were night and day different, they could care less. they told me to pound sand, go get a police report but the Police won't do a report for the incompetence of amazon workers giving your package to some one else in error, that's not theft, illegal to even do a p/report for this. So again pound sand... I learned from this to NEVER use gift cards on large purchases on amazon as you will have ZERO recourse in this situation I was in. Thankfully after about a week someone I guess around my streets actually dropped off the package to my house , no idea where it was at but if they were not honest they would have had a very nice Panasonic 4k player that costs almost $400... oh, then if you do manage to get a p/report then they will tell you it's the wrong format and lie.. This is all over Reddit by so many consumers as they do it to everyone so that they do not have to replace anything if it's there mistake... Real nice company Jassy!
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everestsun
03-04-2025 at 12:27 AM.
03-04-2025 at 12:27 AM.
Quote from misel00 :
Don't even think they will do anything for you, trust me, they are told to just say NO and repeat the same nonsense when you email them, does not matter where you send the email it will all go back to the same overseas group but they will call them selves something else. how do I know? I was screwed by them out of $500 in them sending me worthless amazon gift cards by THEM!!! that should have taken 1-2 days to fix, NOPE.. no one could care less, they tried to tell me the g/cards were used but all of them were not even activated by guess who,, Amazon directly. I took about 4 weeks and dozens of emails , calls, hours, etc, applying all sorts of external pressure on them and then they barely took care of it. They could care less and if you do a c/back there system is programmed to close your account(most will not car ebut if you have your whole eco system(data, photos. etc) in prime then your sh*t out of luck!).. Nice company, pure cr*p! Trust me , don't bother with Amazon your going to just be told to pound sand over and over. i would bark up the tree of best buy but there C/S has gone to sh*t also the past 2 years and it's terrible as well! Amazon thinks they are doing you a favor when you buy something from them now! Here is another thing they did to me during the holidays , they delivered my $350 item to the wrong address, I had photos of where the amazon worker delivered it to from when they took the delivery photo and legit photos of my place on my account. the two were night and day different, they could care less. they told me to pound sand, go get a police report but the Police won't do a report for the incompetence of amazon workers giving your package to some one else in error, that's not theft, illegal to even do a p/report for this. So again pound sand... I learned from this to NEVER use gift cards on large purchases on amazon as you will have ZERO recourse in this situation I was in. Thankfully after about a week someone I guess around my streets actually dropped off the package to my house , no idea where it was at but if they were not honest they would have had a very nice Panasonic 4k player that costs almost $400... oh, then if you do manage to get a p/report then they will tell you it's the wrong format and lie.. This is all over Reddit by so many consumers as they do it to everyone so that they do not have to replace anything if it's there mistake... Real nice company Jassy!
Thanks for sharing. Do you recall what kind of error message you saw when you first found out that the $500 gift card Amazon sent you was worthless? Did it say $0 balance, or did it say that it had been already applied to another account similar to the screen shot I included in my first post? The reason I am asking is to see how accurate their messages are. The error messages we see in consumer redemption user interface may not be the direct translation of system errors. Sometimes they are just the default error messages when they don't want to expose their internal system errors. At this point, I am still not 100% sure if my gift card was redeemed by another account. Otherwise why did they refuse to tell me the redemption time while they had no problem sharing redemption time with other customers in the past?

Regarding to delivery, I have experienced problems twice in the last 3 months. Once they delivered my package to my neighbor's house, and another time my neighbor's package was delivered to my house. Fortunately, we found our packages.
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Last edited by everestsun March 4, 2025 at 03:12 AM.
Joined Mar 2019
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Brometheuz
03-04-2025 at 06:04 PM.
03-04-2025 at 06:04 PM.
I can confirm this happened to me but I bought Starbucks cards at Amazon

I tried redeeming them and was told that they were already redeemed. Amazon then refunded me the purchase price.
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phewry
03-07-2025 at 09:10 PM.
03-07-2025 at 09:10 PM.
Why even use gift cards? pay with your credit card and get cash back.
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Robocamper510
03-12-2025 at 11:58 AM.
03-12-2025 at 11:58 AM.
Smells like a scam 👃👀
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everestsun
03-13-2025 at 12:31 PM.
03-13-2025 at 12:31 PM.
Upon looking closely, I have found that Best Buy opened a back door allowing anyone to anonymously retrieve customers eGift card codes in seconds by inputting simple order information that can be easily accessed by Best buy employees and contractors. No login is required. And no email verification is required.

This is a shocking security volubility. While other eGift card sellers only allow eGift card code display when clicking a unique embedded URL from recipient's email, Best Buy allows anyone to display eGift card codes by typing a simple (very short) URL in an incognito window.

You may have noticed that Best Buy does not ask sender and recipient information. It treats eGift cards the same way as other physical products. Once the eGift card is delivered (the first time), Best Buy no longer protects the order information with high security allowing scammers to steal customers eGift card codes easily.

Do not leave unredeemed eGift cards with bestbuy.com.

I am still in the dispute process with Chase Visa. It says the typical timeframe is 35 days.
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Last edited by everestsun March 13, 2025 at 12:35 PM.
Joined Oct 2014
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everestsun
03-23-2025 at 03:15 PM.
03-23-2025 at 03:15 PM.
Chase has closed the dispute and credited me $200. I was lucky that I found the eGift card had been redeemed by the scammer within 60 days from my credit card statement date to qualify for a dispute.

Thank you everyone for your support.

A lesson learned:

Do not buy eGift cards from Best Buy unless you redeem them immediately. As I mentioned in my previous post, Best Buy has a very serious security hole in their eGift card delivery process that they do not require account login or email access in order to display the code on the screen.
Reply
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