Target appears to be taking aim at gift card resellers and it’s getting messy.
Every so often they run deals – like this current one – where they offer a Target gift card free when buying a third party gift card like Apple. Just over a year ago they started being a pain in the ass because if you took advantage of one of those deals online and had never attached a Target gift card to your account before, Target took the liberty of attaching one for you (see this post for more about that). That meant that you couldn’t resell that particular gift card as it wasn’t possible for anyone else to balance check it.
For as annoying as that was, it got worse. With recent deals Target started arbitrarily locking even more of these bonus Target gift cards to people’s accounts. It wasn’t every $10 gift card and there wasn’t any clear pattern as to when this would happen. Since that started happening, I’ve been recommending only taking advantage of those deals if you weren’t planning on reselling the Target gift cards and were happy redeeming them yourself. We rarely shop at Target, so I’ve tended to give these deals a miss for the most part as it just wasn’t worth the potential hassle.
It gets even worse though. Target is now retroactively locking Target gift cards to accounts, even on purchases dating back to September 2020 or possibly even earlier than that. In many cases those $10 gift cards will have been redeemed and so it’s a moot point. However, if they haven’t been redeemed yet and had been resold, the people who bought them no longer have access to the cards, potentially resulting in chargebacks for whoever they bought them from.
They have form for taking strict action on gift card resellers. Every year they offer a 10% discount when buying their gift cards and they place a limit of $300 or $500 on purchases per person. When they’ve identified people exceeding those limits, they’ve been known to cancel those gift cards and not proactively refund the payment cards of the purchasers. That was always messy, but at least in those instances there were clearly defined limits and so people had the choice as to whether or not they wanted to risk buying more than the $300 or $500 limit.
With these latest examples though, Target is locking gift cards to accounts where people didn’t exceed any specified limit. Target happily sold them the gift cards, then had seller’s remorse nine months down the line. It’s therefore absurd that Target deems it appropriate to take this kind of retroactive action against people who bought gift cards so long ago, especially considering they didn’t break any rules.
Thanks to Eugene for the heads up about these issues. Good luck to any of you out there inadvertently caught up in this new mess.