Well, this is weird.
Groupon and LivingSocial have run a number of decent gift card deals recently, offering anything from 20% up to 80% off gift card for select brands. They’ve all been low denomination cards – $5-$20 – but there seems to be something wrong with their sourcing of at least one of those brands.
Like many others, I bought a $20 CVS gift card for $16 recently. It turns out that the card had a zero balance; that can occasionally happen if there’s some kind of activation issue, but that wasn’t the reason here.
Instead, it looks like Groupon and LivingSocial are selling old gift cards that got redeemed many years ago. Several people have reported this happening on the cards they bought and the same thing happened with mine. As you can see above, the card was activated on September 12, 2017 with a $20 balance and was then redeemed many months later on April 10, 2018.
I’ve reached out to Groupon to get a refund, but it looks like we’ll have to be very careful with purchases from Groupon and LivingSocial in the future. As far as I’m aware it’s only CVS gift cards that have been affected by this issue, but please let us know if you’ve had issues with other recently discounted brands like Saks, Dunkin’, Grubhub, etc.
Update: Within just a few hours of contacting Groupon’s Customer Support, I’ve received a refund of the $16 paid for the CVS gift card.
Gift cards bought from Bestbuy.com 2 years ago aren’t even accessible anymore
My CVS gift cards were also empty. Now, their online customer support isn’t accepting messages – terrible! Did Elon Musk buy Groupon too??
Thanks for posting because I wouldn’t have found out until months later at a CVS .
If you go to ‘My Groupons’ and then select ‘See Details’ for the CVS gift card, on the right hand side on desktop you should see a gray box saying ‘Need Help With Your Groupons?Contact Customer Support’.
That did work for Groupon at first, but not for livingsocial because when I press “send,” nothing gets sent. I tried using Groupon’s online support for livingsocial, but that also stopped working, as if the company’s website developed a bug or disabled something soon after my first request. I’ve tried on multiple browsers too.
However, they responded to my first request and said they’ll issue a refund. Hopefully, they’ll fix the online contact issues because there are others who bought the gift cards after I told them about the sale and will likely need refunds too. At this point, the company should automatically refund everyone instead.
I just tried submitting again but without attaching the screenshot of CVS gift card’s balance info, and that went through. Hopefully, I’ll get a response for a refund soon, then can tell others about the customer support process.
What did Groupon say when they responded? Did they give you a refund or replacement?
Thank you @Stephen Pepper for this post.
When I got the gift card, I did check for balance but the balance page kept on showing error. I thought maybe the balance page was broken.
Then I went to store and tried to use it and I was told it was $0 balance.
I thought maybe I printed one of my old gift cards.
This finally clarified.
FYI, I messaged them about this issue and now I’m being told they’ve escalated it to Resolutions Team and will get back to me within a week. Let’s see.
Glad it was helpful 🙂 If my experience is anything to go by, you’ll get a refund pretty soon rather than having to wait a week as it sounds like they’re well aware of this particular issue.
I recently found out that I also ended up with a $0 balance on my CVS $20 gift card when I tried to use it in-store and online. I’ve contacted Groupon a few times and all the customer service representatives are unhelpful-they’re either ignoring what I’ve written or they’re trying to avoid fixing the problem. They keep saying they cannot give me a refund because it’s “Final Sale” under the “Fine Print” despite the circumstances. Since I made the purchase over three months ago and paid with my Groupon Bucks, could I be too late in asking Groupon for help to fix the issue? What should I do now? Any ideas?
Never mind, I explained everything to them. I gave them the phone number to call checking the gift card balance and the history of transactions through the automated phone service to prove that it was used in 2008-before I made the purchase. Then they gave me a refund, which took me many tries and a lot of convincing for that to happen.
Great, glad that worked out eventually 🙂
I meant to say that my $20 CVS gift card was redeemed in 2018, not 2008! If I hadn’t encountered your site, I might not have investigated further on my CVS gift card because I would have assumed it was one of my gift cards I had already used and forgotten about. So I’m grateful for your post! From my experience, the Groupon customer service has been terrible lately as it’s getting worse. They’ve been doing their to best avoid fixing the problems from providing deficient products/services.
Thanks for posting! So glad that I found this! I found your post using AI, and realized that I am not the only one. This happened to me. I had not been able to use my gift card at the store. They told me it had a $0 balance, and I was sure that I had not used it. No one that I know had access to that card or my Groupon account. I recently decided to check the CVS card balance through the CVS website. It showed the activity on that card, and I saw that the card had been used at a California CVS in 2018. I purchased my card in 2017, so it was used after I made the purchase. I had not been to California since I bought the card. I reached out to Groupon, and they credited my Groupon account next day.