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Prepaid Visa/MasterCard "Gift Cards" from shops/supermarkets - does anyone still sell them?

Fingerbobs
Posts: 1,690 Forumite


in Credit cards
These used to be for sale in most supermarkets and places like WHSmith, Boots and Argos alongside the normal gift cards, usually in £25 and £50 denominations (although Morrisons had £100 ones), but I haven't seen any for a while.
Does anyone know of any shops still selling them?
Just to pre-empt the obvious comments - I am well aware that these things carried hefty fees, and for most purposes made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I won't go into my reasons for wanting one in this thread; suffice to say it's nothing dodgy.
Does anyone know of any shops still selling them?
Just to pre-empt the obvious comments - I am well aware that these things carried hefty fees, and for most purposes made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I won't go into my reasons for wanting one in this thread; suffice to say it's nothing dodgy.
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https://www.mastercard.co.uk/en-gb/personal/find-a-card/general-prepaid-mastercard.html ?
E.g. https://travelmoney.asda.com/asda/Basket - the card can be in ££0 -
grumbler said:0
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No, they've all been replaced by Prepaid Mastercards (or Visas) which only work at specific retailers (i.e. restaurants, fashion, activities etc). Probably in no small part because of the kind of 'nothing dodgy' loopholes you were trying to take advantage of, but also because they were a favourite of scammers.
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I haven't seen any for a while.
They were a useful tool in the points/rewards generating game. I would buy them at a discount, typically 7-10% which would more than offset the activation fee (4.5% on the £100 cards), then empty them out in one fell swoop to whichever financial institution would take them. One of a number of profitable manufactured spending schemes.
This was of course going on for a number of years after the 3V/Pay.Com and NS&I scheme ended which died not long after being publicised.
Pity they went, they were good, even if the issuers did keep trying to stop them being used like this as their business model relied on people not spending everything on them for whatever reason.0 -
Thanks all. Yes pity they've gone. The last place I saw some was in a branch of Argos. They had a small quantity (maybe 3 or 4) left, and they never restocked them.
I stopped using them because I ran out of places that would actually accept them and turn them back into money, but the returns on each card "processed" were small so I never did it in a big way. I took part in the 3V bonanza of course0 -
I used the £100 Vanillas to pay off my credit card and top up Viola for free - it got annoying when Vanilla reduced the online purchase limit to £40, technically tripling the workload.0
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Bitrefill website sell them, up to £40. You have to have cryptocurrency though, which peoples views on vary.0
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I saw a load of Vanilla Mastercards in Whsmith this week so they're still about.1
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The_Urbanite said:I saw a load of Vanilla Mastercards in Whsmith this week so they're still about.
Edited to add: looks like Sainsbury's and Asda also stock them...
https://www.myvanillagiftcard.com/whereToBuy/
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Yes, I spotted some in Sainsburys just before Christmas. They seem to have delisted Amazon ones though (which I guess makes sense as they compete directly with them via Argos).
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