Recently, I found myself in pos­ses­sion of a $20 “vir­tual” Visa gift card.  To make a long story short, I found the Wol­fram Alpha iPhone app use­ful enough to spend $20 on it when the price dropped from $50, but then it later dropped to $2 and Mr. Wol­fram decided to issue refunds to those that bought at the higher prices.  They issued this refund in the form of a pre-paid vir­tual Visa card.

This vir­tual Visa card has proven dif­fi­cult to actu­ally use in full.  Because it is just a card num­ber in an email mes­sage, you can­not take it into a brick-and-mortar retailer.  They usu­ally want to swipe the card, or at least take a look at the card and sig­na­ture.  “I don’t really have the card, but use this card num­ber that I wrote down for you” will likely be met with skep­ti­cism about card theft and fraud.

Given that brick-and-mortar is out, that leaves only online retail­ers.  Now I am cer­tain that I have come across check­out sys­tems online that let you pay with mul­ti­ple cards but once I needed one, I could not find any.  Nei­ther a Google search nor a ques­tion posed to the lazy­web of Twit­ter turned up good results.  Even Ama­zon, whom I think of as the most robust and mature online retailer, only allows you to pay with a sin­gle card.

I expect that given the dif­fi­culty in spend­ing over $20 (by using the “vir­tual” card com­bined with a “real” card), most peo­ple with the $20 gift card will end up find­ing some item that is, say, $14.99 with a few dol­lars ship­ping and use only the gift card for pay­ment.  The card ends up with a dol­lar and some change on it — not enough to really be use­ful.  This par­tic­u­lar card hap­pens to expire in three months.  I assume Wol­fram has already shelled out the $20, so the card issuer ends up pock­et­ing the leftovers.

Then it hit me.  Ama­zon (and other online retail­ers) let you use gift cer­tifi­cates com­bined with a reg­u­lar credit card.  It was pretty easy to con­vert the vir­tual credit card into store credit by buy­ing a gift cer­tifi­cate.  The result is that I can now use that vir­tual card to buy some­thing more than $20.

It seems pretty easy in ret­ro­spect, but there was a leap in logic there that I could not ini­tially see.  My hope for post­ing this is that some­one else, stuck in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion, per­form­ing a sim­i­lar Google search to the one I failed to find results for, will run across this blog post and dis­cover the gift cer­tifi­cate loophole.

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Tagged as: alpha, card, combine, credit, gift, giftcard, giftcertificate, loophole, multiple, prepaid, prepaidcard, prepaidcreditcard, refund, virtualcard, virtualcreditcard, visa, wolfram