Ask HN: How to redeem a gift card without risking lock-out?

6•magnetic•2w ago

My young daughter got 2 Amazon Gift cards for her birthday, but they look like they've been tampered with. I would like to check whether they are valid or not without having to go through the redeeming process: I want to avoid being at the mercy of a fraud detection algorithm that may lock me out of my account. There was a HN story not too long ago about someone who got locked out of their iCloud account for similar reasons, and the risk doesn't seem to be worth it to me. Surely, I can't be the only one with this problem. How do people do this "safely"?

Comments

toomuchtodo•2w ago

Create a new Amazon account just redeem them? TLDR Sacrificial account.

bdangubic•1w ago

This will 100% never work, it is exactly the kind of thing Amazon etc will prevent. There is not a single business that accepts gift cards that will not immediately flag this and kill the account. It is the first thing you’d write if you were in charge of this, right?

toomuchtodo•1w ago

Have you tried it?

bdangubic•1w ago

Amazon ($25) and iCloud (this one was $10, bought from apple.com), both killed the account, did not try others but safe to assume results would be the same

B1FIDO•1w ago

I've got a crazy bizarre idea. Why don't you contact Amazon customer service and ask them about it?

You can describe the cards and give them the numbers and then tell them why you believe they've been tampered.

I mean it's totally illogical, right?

When I was accused of possessing counterfeit money, I went right to my bank and showed the bills to them (they were, of course, authentic).

al_borland•1w ago

Does Amazon have a number on the card to call for the balance, or is that only a thing with cards for brick and mortar shops?

For what it’s worth, if the gift card was purchased at a store, part of the back needs to be torn off for it to be scanned and activated, which makes all those cards look tampered with. Not sure if that’s what you’re seeing or not.

Ask HN: Anyone Using a Mac Studio for Local AI/LLM?

Discuss – Do AI agents deserve all the hype they are getting?

Ask HN: Ideas for small ways to make the world a better place

Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

LLMs are powerful, but enterprises are deterministic by nature

Ask HN: 10 months since the Llama-4 release: what happened to Meta AI?

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

AI Regex Scientist: A self-improving regex solver

Ask HN: Non-profit, volunteers run org needs CRM. Is Odoo Community a good sol.?

Tell HN: Another round of Zendesk email spam

Ask HN: Is Connecting via SSH Risky?

Ask HN: Has your whole engineering team gone big into AI coding? How's it going?

Ask HN: Why LLM providers sell access instead of consulting services?

Ask HN: How does ChatGPT decide which websites to recommend?

Ask HN: What is the most complicated Algorithm you came up with yourself?

Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?

Ask HN: Mem0 stores memories, but doesn't learn user patterns

Ask HN: Is it just me or are most businesses insane?

Kernighan on Programming

Ask HN: Anyone Seeing YT ads related to chats on ChatGPT?

Ask HN: Does global decoupling from the USA signal comeback of the desktop app?

We built a serverless GPU inference platform with predictable latency

Ask HN: Does a good "read it later" app exist?

Ask HN: Any International Job Boards for International Workers?

Ask HN: Have you been fired because of AI?

Ask HN: Anyone have a "sovereign" solution for phone calls?

Ask HN: Cheap laptop for Linux without GUI (for writing)

Ask HN: How Did You Validate?

GitHub Actions Have "Major Outage"