Give Them Hell

I’ve written in this space before about how much I dislike gift cards – not because I feel there’s anything wrong with these Internet-age descendants of the humble gift certificate, but rather because there’s a real chance that the company you’ve bought them from will lose your records, change card formats without telling you (or sending you a replacement card), or go out of business altogether before you (or the recipient) can cash them in. To that list of possible electronic mishaps, we now have to add the possibility that the company trying to redeem the gift card will suffer a procedural miscue, accuse you of credit card fraud, and have you (or the recipient) arrested and jailed…

A story off of the New York One website tells the curious tale of a customer who went to Best Buy to cash in three American Express gift cards, only to have the clerk on duty handle them incorrectly, decide that it must be a case of credit card fraud, and summon the police. Getting the family members who had purchased the gift cards on the phone to verify the charges and vouch for the recipient didn’t help; the police took her off to jail anyway, and it was several hours later (after the people at American Express finally confirmed that there was no fraud involved and the recipient had done nothing wrong) that she was finally let go. At which point, things actually got worse – at least, from a business standpoint…

On returning to the store, the recipient was not given her money back (including the $180 she paid out of pocket), nor was she given the DVD player she had been trying to purchase; Best Buy told her she’d have to take it up with American Express. American Express, in turn, told her that the money had already been charged by Best Buy, and she’d have to take it up with them. At this point, the recipient did the only reasonable things she could do: she reported the story to the consumer advocate reporter at New York One, and hired an attorney to go after Best Buy. Personally, I hope she asks for an outrageous punitive award – and I hope the court gives it to her…

Best Buy’s explanation is that an employee somehow gave incorrect information to American Express, and that this caused the chain of events that eventually spiraled out of control. I don’t know if that’s even possible, but it’s been 15 years since I last ran a credit card-reader, and perhaps it is now. If it is, however, then the company has a legal responsibility to make sure that anyone who operates such a device knows how to do so correctly – and if they fail to do so, they are responsible for the consequences. In this particular case, the consequences include either false arrest or unlawful detainment (depends on how you’d want to prosecute it), as well as legal liability for defamation of character, public humiliation, deliberate infliction of emotional trauma, and (when they refused to return the customer’s own money, independent of the gift card validation issues) fraud and/or grand theft…

If such a credit card-reader malfunction is not possible, then we can add perjury and conspiracy to commit a felony to the above charges, and all of the people who were responsible for this foul-up should be looking at jail time in addition to putting the company at risk for huge punitive damages. Even worse, though, are the literally millions of people who either have heard or will hear about this episode – not because of this blog, of course, but of the hundreds of other places this story will be posted around the Internet. It’s going to convince a potentially large number of customers to avoid Best Buy, American Express, electronic gift cards, or all of the above, possibly for some time to come. No one is saying that credit card fraud isn’t a serious crime, or that private companies shouldn’t do everything they can to combat it. But as with any other crime, the more people who are falsely accused of credit card fraud, the harder it’s going to be to stop real crimes and catch real criminals later. In which case, the people who are paying for this screw-up are you and me; the public…

And I still hope the gift-card recipient in this story gives the company hell…