AARP Hearing Center
Want a $100 gift card on the cheap? This week one for Best Buy was going for $95. A Bed, Bath and Beyond gift card worth $100 could be had for $94, and a GameStop card, $91. All were being offered for sale on the website Cardpool.com.
Cardpool has bought and sold discounted gift cards for years, but in the last three years the Irving, Texas, company has racked up nearly 2,200 consumer complaints, according to the Better Business Bureau, which gave the firm its lowest rating, an “F.” With complaints arising in every state, the bureau issued a nationwide warning about Cardpool on Dec. 15.
Cardpool is a gift-card exchange that operates alongside the multibillion-dollar gift- and reloadable-card industry. Here’s how exchanges work: Consumers sell physical gift cards or electronic gift cards with unredeemed balances and collect less than the cards’ actual value. Other people scoop up the unwanted cards that are priced at a discount. The exchange — functioning as a middleman — takes a cut of each transaction.
Consumers run a risk
The investigation into the Cardpool complaints was spearheaded by the Better Business Bureau Serving North Central Texas, whose region includes Cardpool’s headquarters. “When a gift card is not new, you … run the risk of not receiving what you bargained for,” warns Monica Horton, a Better Business Bureau spokesperson there.
In Virginia, retiree Lou Ann Rimel, 68, is among consumers who reported being burned by Cardpool. “I won’t use them again, and if anybody asks me, I’m going to tell them I didn’t have positive experiences of late,” the retired teacher’s aide told AARP.
For years she and her husband relied on Cardpool to snap up cheaper-than-face-value Home Depot and Lowe’s gift cards — without a hitch. But a few years ago, she paid Cardpool about $93 for a $100 Lowe’s gift card that didn’t work and when she complained to the company, she was stone-walled. “It wasn’t pleasant,” she recalled. “I spent a lot of time trying to get in touch and they simply wouldn’t respond.”
Bought worthless Kohl’s card
Outside Pasadena, California, Maggie Chatman, 63, is another disgruntled ex-customer. “The exchange is a good premise, but when it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out,” said Chatman, a retired budget coordinator for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. She praises Capital One Visa for giving her a $92 credit after she spent that much on a worthless $100 Kohl’s card — and Cardpool refused to reimburse her, she said.
