We reported on the issue of purchases made from Giftcardmall on eBay which were sometimes being charged as cash advances and incurring cash advance fees. Â See take 1 here and take 2 here.
Reader Ic contacted Giftcardmall about the issue and he just received an email from Giftcardmall stating that the issue has been resolved.
Here’s a quote of the text of the email:
Thank you for your inquiry. The Cash Advance fee issue has been resolved. As you were charged the cash advance fee, please contact Paypal to assist further at 1 (888) 221-1161.
We appreciate your business and are happy to assist you with your concerns.
Sincerely,
Carmelita
Gift Card Mall
Customer Care Specialist
[email protected]
If this CSR is correct, there will not be any more issues of cash advances with purchases from Giftcardmall on eBay.
This is great news because a little birdie told me that there’ll be a bunch of gift card deals tomorrow on eBay, some from Giftcardmall (Babies R Us, Lowes and more).
We don’t yet know if they removed the ‘Financial’ coding completely or they just worked it out that it isn’t considered a cash advance. Let us know what you find.
It’s also heartening to see in the email, “as you were charged the cash advance fee, please contact Paypal to assist further”, meaning that they’re taking responsibility for the wrongly charged cash advance fees. Hopefully, Paypal will be able to do a fix to get those fees reversed or to reimburse us for those fees. (I have my doubts that it will be that simple…)
GCM charged my purchase of Target GC on ebay as Cash Advance on 04/21/2016. Used Citi DCB and now the $10 cash advance fee is pending. Will dispute when it posts.
Has anyone been “made whole” for the CA fee by GiftCardMall or eBay? GCM sent me to Chase, who would do nothing except punt to PayPal, who then punted to Ebay…
I’m not surprised that it wasn’t simple. I didn’t get any CA. Maybe try disputing the CA? You never signed your name to a CA. Not sure, just a thought.
Yeah, Chase rep was like “nope” so I’ll just have to eat the $15. It could have been worse, I guess.
definitely fixed the problem because i just used my prestige card with $0 CA limit and the transaction went thru. 🙂
Thanks for the data point!
you’re welcome. transaction coded as “department store” – something to keep in mind when using chase freedom certain quarters… hehe
Oooh, nice thought. Not sure if all credit cards code the same, but we’ll have to keep an eye on this.
“This listing is restricted to pre-approved buyers only.” You have to be pre-approved to buy a gift card from GCM now??
We appreciate your interest in this promotion. After further review, we have discovered that the Pre-approved list is showing up because the Gift card promotion is not valid until 4/24/2015 at 8 a.m. Please replace your order during that time. We apologized for the inconvenience it has caused you.
It looks like Gift Card Mall is based in California? And so is Ebay, of course. So they may not be available until 8 AM PST, or 11 AM for us east-coasters. I just tried at 10 AM and got the same message.
The big question though is that if it will be recoded back to receive 5x with Ink. I somehow got banned from PP Digital Gifts so Im quite interested in the answer to this
Just put in a small order as a test. I will update when it posts (unfortunately it takes several days)
Can now confirm, GCMall does not earn 5x with Ink
Appreciated.
Dan, can you tell me which category it’s considered, in the Chase Blueprint? Is it Departement Store or Financial or something else?
Thanks!
Unfortunately can’t yet see. Chase is annoyingly slow to show purchases. Shows as pending for 3 days, now the charge doesn’t show at all but in my UR rewards I can see points for next statement and its 1x. I expect the charge to fully post by tomorrow and then I can see the category.
Its now visible so I can report that it shows up simply as “Miscellaneous”.
Thanks Dan!
Has anyone has success with Paypal? I called, escalated, and was essentially given the runaround and the phrase “card issuer issue” was repeated a hundred times. Overseas call center, so maybe that was the issue?