Gift cards purchased from Verizon official website are invalid.

[JIAZHA73]

Update.

The representative who answered my call said she would work on it and contact with me ASAP. However, there is no response after a week, so I believe she already forgot this thing.

I called Verizon customer service again today. The one who answered my call transferred me to a home-service company.

I filed a complain to Federal Trade Commission.

[jtpete]

JIAZHA73, can you click Follow Me on my profile page? jtpete

[jtpete]

JIAZHA73​ KYUCHO47​ jman02​ nd_football​

I was finally able to get the $100 credited to my Verizon Wireless account. These are the steps I'd recommend:

1. Call Customer Care during normal business hours and ask for a representative who is in BOTH the Trade-In department and in Customer Care. Although these gift cards have nothing to do with trade-in deals, this department takes care of all gift cards.
   • If you are able to get to the Trade-In department, skip to step 5.
   • If you are unable to get to the Trade-In department, give the rep your Order Number, Location Code and gift card numbers, and have the rep confirm that the card is indeed invalid and that you indeed need a refund by showing proof of purchase in-store.
2. Go to a corporate store and bring proof of purchase and your gift card with you. Tell them that you have been instructed by the phone rep to come in to show proof of purchase in order to get a refund. Ask them to look up the notes on your account.
3. When (yes, when) the store tells you that they have nothing to do with VerizonWireless.com purchases, have them call Customer Care for you and to tell the phone rep directly that the store does not take care of gift cards (or whatever reason they give).
4. When they pass the phone to you, now ask for a rep who is in the Trade-In department. Tell them that on Friday, July 14th, a rep in this department was able to resolve this issue for a customer. This is a roundabout way to speak to Customer Care, but by doing so, they can't just tell you that you have to go to the store!
5. Hopefully, you'll end up with a rep from the Trade-In department who also does Customer Care. Again, tell them that a rep in their department was able to resolve this problem on Friday, July 14th by issuing a credit to the account. This is an unusual problem, and it sounded like someone had to authorize the credit, so I think the department would definitely remember doing this.

For whatever reason, apparently in-store and online stores are "completely separate" according to the in-store reps. This is a large part of the problem; each group or department just thinks someone else is responsible for refunding your hundreds of dollars. No one wants to take responsibility. I was lucky that my third time in-store, this rep made the call for me and told the phone rep to figure it out. I was also lucky that this first phone rep knew to transfer me to the Trade-In department. And I was especially lucky that the rep who stayed on the phone with me for TWO HOURS (while I stood in a store), after physically going back and forth from different departments on different floors in her building, understood the difficulty of the problem and pleaded to her department on my behalf.

I filed complaints to appropriate consumer groups--you should, too, if only to pay it forward. Verizon needs to know that not only does this invalid gift card problem exist, but also that it's not the customer's responsibility to navigate their corporate labyrinth, using sheer luck, in order to get money that is justly due.

[JIAZHA73]

I will try this method and update my case in next week.

[JIAZHA73]

Anyone who are planning to purchase Verizon gift cards as gifts need to be careful. The invalid card problem may happen randomly and you don't want to be the one.

[knic4896]

I am having the same issue with my gift cards right now, $500 worth of gift cards. I have spoken to 6 represenatives in 4 departments and chatted online on verizon website and facebook and have gotten no where. Were you able to resolve this?

[kevin94]

Exact same thing happened with me. I am out $450 and my bill is now past due. I've called over six times, driven twice to a corporate store, spoken to four different departments and everyone just keeps putting the responsibility from one department to the other. I filed a complaint with the FTC and labeled it as a scam. It's absolutely ridiculous that I've spent well over ten hours of my time trying to resolve this issue while no one at Verizon seems to care about resolving my issue, but they're more than happy to have my account status with them tarnished because they can't seem to fix a simple issue.

[vzw_customer_support]

I'm so sorry to hear about the issues spent with clearing up this concern, kevin94. That's not the experience we want for you. We would need more info to best help, please send a Private Note. 

RyanM_VZW

[pueblo]

Just an update from 2023.  This is STILL happening.   Luckily I had a service rep who applied my gift card credits to my account as a courtesy to save me a trip and afternoon at a corporate store.  I cited Reddit posts dating back to 2017 with the exact same issues.  My chat rep saved me time, but I still spent several hours fixing it because he/she first sent me through all channels that should have been appropriate.  We found out what this thread already says.... that every department passes the buck to somewhere else.   Every time, eventually, you get transferred to an automated system that simply hangs up on you because your card is invalid.  

It is an endless loop of no help.  I got lucky and had a helpful chat rep.  However, I see countless posts online from people that did not have the same luck.

I'll file an FTC complaint too just to keep the ball rolling.