My successful experience replacing an Incomm Visa prepaid card
/There is, by all accounts, an epidemic of fraud striking prepaid debit card retailers across the Western United States. I’ve had the remarkable good fortune of never encountering a tampered prepaid debit card in the wild. So when I needed an Incomm prepaid debit card replaced this month, I jumped at the opportunity to find out how the process works in practice.
Fraud has become a huge problem, but not my problem
If you visit manufactured spend forums you quickly find an ocean of complaints about gift card fraud. Not the “elder abuse” fraud that newspapers love to write about, but genuine larceny: card packaging is opened, the details of the card are swiped, then the card is repackaged so that when an unsuspecting customer activates the card, the balance is quickly drained by the fraudsters. I don’t have a representative sample but it sounds like there are at least some stores on the West Coast where almost every card seems to have been tampered with.
This was not my problem. My problem was that I messed up the magnetic stripe on a card. In other words, user error. Since the balance was still there and I had the card details, I could have liquidated the card online for a tax payment, or to reload my Amazon balance, but instead I called up Incomm to see what the process was to replace the card.
Incomm prepaid card Replacement process
When I realized my error, I first called the number on the back of my Visa prepaid card (833-322-6760). During that call, which according to my phone lasted 17 minutes, I provided the usual card information, as well as the prepaid card’s “serial number,” which is located on the bottom right quadrant of the back of the card, as well as on the card packaging. The phone representative also asked for my name and address. Finally, he asked me to send “copies” of the receipt, the front and back of the prepaid card, as well as my government ID, to “consumed@incomm.com”. I took photos of the documents using my phone on my dining room table.
I first sent the documents on Friday, December 1, 2023, and on Monday, December 4, I received an e-mail from the same address asking for copies of the front of the card and the receipt again. I immediately submitted new pictures.
On Monday, December 11, I received a new card via USPS first class mail. That card had to be activated over the phone, which according to my phone records took 1 minute. I had the option to set a PIN over the phone or use any 4 digits on the new card’s first use, like a normal Incomm prepaid debit card. The card could be and was immediately liquidated through one of my usual in-person channels.
Conclusion
Obviously I wasn’t going to freak out over holding a card for 10 days instead of my usual 90 minutes, but despite my story being anti-climactic there are some obvious lessons you may need a refresher on if you’ve gotten lazy in your manufactured spend routine:
Keep your cards, receipts and packaging together. You can use filing cabinets, ziplock bags (guilty) or anything else you like, but if you get a fradulent or defective card you will want to be able to pull everything out at once without having to triple check card numbers and your purchase dates and times. Any unforced errors you make are going to slow down the replacement process.
Act quickly. In the case of tampered cards this is more important, but even if you mess up your own card, Incomm isn’t going to replace it until you contact them. Set aside 20 minutes and pick up the phone.
Don’t float more than you can afford to. I got stuck with $500 in the ether for 10 days, which didn’t bother me because it was a short period and a reasonable amount. If I’d just bought $10,000 worth of cards and needed them all replaced before my next credit card bill was due, I’d have been sweating a lot harder!
