Patent ID: 8452705

Claim:
A method of administering a pre-paid payment instrument, the method comprising: receiving, by a distributed computer system, a value from a sending party; associating the value with the pre-paid payment instrument and storing the value in a medium of the computer system; associating an identifier with the value and the pre-paid payment instrument; associating an expiration criteria with the pre-paid payment instrument; indexing and storing the identifier, the expiration criteria and the associated value in a memory of an authentication system executing within the distributed computer system; designating, by the sending party to the distributed computer system via a first user device, a receiving party, wherein the receiving party is different from the sending party; providing, by the distributed computer system to the receiving party via a second user device, an authentication certificate including the identifier associated with the pre-paid payment instrument having the associated stored value in response to receiving the value; validating the authentication certificate against the identifier and value index of the authentication system; determining if the stored value has been used by the receiving party prior to an expiration time based on the expiration criteria; and responsive to an unused value remaining on the pre-paid payment instrument at the expiration time, automatically returning at least a portion of the unused value to the sending party, wherein the expiration criteria and the expiration time are determined by the sending party and received by the distributed computer system from the sending party.