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Gift card resale site Cardpool has permanently shut down. Sellers should have already received payment for completed orders. Buyers should use gift cards ASAP because the Cardpool guarantee no longer applies. If you have older cards (i.e. those purchased prior to 9/1/20), it isn’t yet clear that you’ll have any way to access them (Cardpool says that they are working on creating a way to access them, but given that they have closed down I just don’t know how much of a priority this will be). This is a good reminder that best practice is to keep screen shots of everything and to use secondhand gift cards as soon as possible when you buy them. Personally, I only buy secondhand cards when I have an immediate use in mind and even then I only buy when I am as confident as possible that there will be no return / refund situation. The “TL;DR” message you see at the Cardpool support site makes it clear that you shouldn’t sit idle on purchased cards.
Stephen at GC Galore notes that the writing had been on the wall for Cardpool for quite a while, though I hadn’t been paying attention to them through the pandemic and had missed that earlier news. Thankfully, this is not like The Plastic Merchant situation where the business shut down without sellers being paid. However, it does create a bit of a wild west situation in that you may have difficulty getting any resolution against a seller who uses the balance on cards they sold to you. Use ’em or lose ’em. See GC Galore for more about Cardpool’s demise and see the full statement from Cardpool here.
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