Another post about Metabank Pathward gift cards? Yep! Sorry not sorry. Let’s start with liquidation methods.
Liquidation
Public options include:
- Kiva
- BravoPay
- money orders
Quasi-public options:
- Reloadable cards like Bluebird and Serve
- Photo-kiosk assistance at a a major retail chain
And private options include:
Remember the MEAB unofficial site tagline: Always be probing.
PIN Transaction Limits
- There’s more to the liquidation story though – BlackHawk Network, the underlying processing service powering MetaBank Pathward, has recently implemented transaction limits for PIN based transactions. The current restrictions as we know them:
- $480 maximum per store per rolling 6 minutes, per type of card (ex regular Visa vs Everywhere)
- Multiple declines will lock a card for one to two day
- There may also be a non-PIN debit limit, though reports on those are mixed at best so let’s consider it a ymmv proposition
What’s Next?
Well, there are lots of answers but I think we can group them into one of two points:
- Visa and Mastercard gift cards aren’t the only manufactured spend technique out there
- Pathward isn’t the only Visa and Mastercard gift card issuer
Good luck friends!
Google Bard’s summary of this post.