Consumer complaint received 2023-05-11
Company: Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc.
State: LA
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Trouble using your card
Sub-issue: Can't use card to make purchases

Complaint:
I am a XXXX XXXX. I have worked with the XXXX company for several years now. They have always given me rewards cards with XXXX amount of money in it ( anywhere from {$1000.00} to XXXX ). They had always use the Omni card company to issue these reward cards. I never had a problem with them before until the XXXX company stopped working with him and went with another company. In XXXX occasion I had a situation which was that one of the cards was about to expire so I called the company parentheses the Omni card company. ) and told him about the situation and they said dont worry about it. Were going to just go ahead and issue you a new one and I will give you more time for you to use the money in it, which they did send me a new card and I used it with no problems that was about a little over a year ago. XXXX last year at the round XX/XX/2022, I encountered the same situation, I had XXXX cards that only have a few weeks left before they would expire. I called the company ( Omni ) and I spoke with a gentleman about the situation and he told me very specifically that I couldnt do anything until the card booth expire in once this would happen that I needed to call back and let him know that I needed new cards and that they would you show me XXXX new ones with the new expiration day. Ill ask him XXXX again if he was sure of it because I still had a few weeks left but I just needed more time to spend the money I had in those cars and she repeat it again that I had to wait till the XXXX cards expire and then called back to request new ones to be issued. When this happen in the cards finally expired I called back and I spoke to another rep about it and she said that she would take care of it and that I would just need it to wait till I would get an email from them and answer a few questions on the email, and that would be it. After about a XXXX of not getting any emails I called back and I spoke to a different rap who said that they had sent the email but they had misspelled the email address in that was the reason why I never received the email, but he was sending it right away this time. Once again, XXXX weeks later, still no email received I called again a third time and I went through exactly the same process. They didnt have the email correctly but they were taking care of it this time. At that time I had to leave out of the country for a month when I came back I realize I still had never received the email and I was back to square one. I got on the phone again, and I spoke to a different person as usual, and I ask you please let me speak to a supervisor, someone up higher. I spoke to a lady who apologize many times for the situation, but she also gave me a different story and she said that she didnt believe anything could be done about the expired. Cars sings. They were gift cards and they expired if they dont get used so she didnt believe that they could issue new cars for this since the money was basically lost. She also said that she believed it was a big miscommunication and miss information from the rep from the beginning in that this could actually help us to try and resolve this situation somehow things we were misinformed by one of the reps, so that she would elevate the skis up higher to one of her superiors, and she believed that possibly a good outcome would result from this and that we would get the XXXX new cars re-issued. She said she could actually see the XXXX cars that had expired had approximately {$8000.00} between the both of them. I received an email about the case saying that they were working on it and that I would get a response within a few days and apologies again for the situation. Sure enough I received another email a few days later, saying that they were very sorry to inform me that they couldnt do anything about it since the XXXX cars it had expired where reward/gift cards and other money was not use on the specific time give them on the back of the card so they couldnt do anything about it since we shouldve known the rules that they had. 

Once again, if the wrap wouldnt have told me and assured me that I needed to wait till the cars expire to be able to call them and request new cards, XXXX I would have use those XXXX cards and no lead money just be taken by them. I consider this a steal. They miss lead you to do the wrong thing so they can take the money that it is for the customers.. they were overly nice and polite when XXXX ( the company that was getting the cards from them ) was working with them, but once they stopped and switch to a different card provider they definitely stop treating customers right because they didnt find they had a need to be fair to people anymore unless we would have certain tie to them. 
This is very disappointing, and feels exactly as being robbed.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation