> I'm more curious how/why the author ended up with a $500 gift card. That's a large amount, and the author never shares how this was obtained, which seems like a key missing detail. Did the author buy the gift card for himself (why?) or did someone give him a very large gift (why not mention that?)

The author mentions a big store (names it similar to Walmart for US based readers).

I would assume this was an accepted form of "return a product without a receipt" or "we want to accept your complain about this product we sold going crazy 1 day after it's warranty but we cannot give you cash back" etc

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evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't understand. Gift cards typically cannot be returned, at least in the US. And the author said the gift card was redeemed "to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan", which also cannot be returned I'd imagine.

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Gabrys1 2 days ago | parent [-]

But gift cards aren't supposed to work that, right? If it wasn't "legal" or "okay" to have a 500 dollar card, they shouldn't be sold. They are available, therefore they should be perfectly usable.

I don't want to speculate more, but one of the use cases for them is for people that choose to not use cards online (or even don't have credit cards at all) to be able to buy digital goods with cash.

Either way, if we're questioning buying/using the gift card, we're blaming the victim

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evanelias 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not blaming anyone; I just find it surprising that this detail wasn't mentioned or explained. Its omission makes the article less trustworthy to me.

People are fast to pull out pitchforks in response to outrage-bait posts like this, but (generally speaking) a nontrivial percentage of such posts are intentionally omitting details which can help explain the other side's actions.

Also I genuinely wasn't familiar with this specific use-case for gift cards. At least in the US, you can buy general-purpose prepaid debit cards for this type of thing instead, or use various services which generate virtual cards e.g. privacy.com. To me that seems infinitely more normal than buying a large-value "gift card" for yourself, but I'm admittedly not familiar with the options in other countries.

	▲	Gabrys1 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		1. The prepaid Visa or Mastercard come with an extra fee (like 5-6 dollars per card if I recall correctly?) 2. I didn't see the prepaid cards in stores outside the US, so they are probably not that popular outside. Sometimes you also want to shift your spending, like if you spend 500 USD this month at this store, you'll get some good % cashback. So you end up buying a gift card that you know you'll definitely use next month. I think this is irrelevant, TBH.
	▲	throwaway290 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		privacy.com even if it was available in some country just means you give transactions of your identity to some other company. Cash (and so gift cards if they don't accept cash) is the most private way.