(EXPIRED) Swych: Upload Gift Cards & Donate 10c, Share For 10% Off, Has Potential To Go Badly Wrong

Swych has teamed up with Plastic Bank to launch a new initiative that donates money when users upload copies of their plastic gift cards, as well as rewarding them for sharing that activity on social media. If those users don’t consider what they’re doing though, this promotion has the potential to go very badly for them.

Uploading Gift Cards

The first step of the promotion is to upload images of your plastic gift cards, along with the card number and PIN. Once those are uploaded, you have to take a photo of the front of the plastic gift card(s), as well as a screenshot of the card(s) displayed in the ‘Uploaded’ section of the ‘My Cards’ screen in the Swych app.

Sharing

Once you’ve done that, tag 10+ friends when posting the picture and screenshot on your social media account (Instagram, Twitter or Facebook) with #CutThePlastic. Include a quick comment of how uploading your plastic gift card to @GoSwych generates a donation to help save our oceans.

Donation For Them…

For every gift card that’s uploaded and shared, Swych will donate 10c to Plastic Bank, a charity working to reduce plastic pollution in the oceans. They’ll do this up to 20 times per month per user (i.e. a maximum of $2 per user).

…And A Discount For You…

Users who include 10 uploaded cards in a single post on social media will be awarded with a coupon code for 10% off a future Swych purchase. These codes are awarded monthly and it seems like you can get one each month until the program ends on December 31, 2019.

…And An Additional Bonus For You

Swych will award you with 50 points (worth $0.50) when you upload 20+ cards in a calendar month. This is limited to one per person and two per household and (I’m assuming) can be earned each month.

Potential For Compromised Gift Cards?

I’m not entirely sure that Swych has thought through the procedures of this program particularly well. They want users to upload pictures of themselves with their plastic gift cards to social media, but that could go badly wrong.

If they hold the gift cards round the wrong way, they could end up sharing the card numbers and PINs to the general public. This might just be me being overly paranoid and/or not giving people enough credit for not doing something silly like that, but it seems like Swych could have included a different requirement that didn’t involve people uploading pictures of themselves with their gift cards to entirely remove that risk.

You can find out more about this initiative here.