Case #PR-2026-011 — a $23,400 gift-card loss, recovered

The loss. The client, a small-business owner, was told by "payment support" that her account had been flagged and that she needed to move her working balance into a set of gift cards to "secure" it while the flag was reviewed. Over three days she purchased $23,400 in gift cards across two retailers and read the codes to the caller. When the "review" closed and nothing returned, the account was frozen and the "support" number stopped answering.

What we found in the first 48 hours

Gift-card cases live and die on a narrow window, and this one had the facts to use it:

• The card numbers and purchase records. The client had the retail receipts with the card serial numbers, plus the card numbers themselves. That is the part most victims forget to keep, and it is exactly what a reversal needs.
• The redemption state. We checked each card against the issuers. Most had been activated but not yet redeemed; a small number had already been moved. The un-redeemed cards were the recoverable asset, and the time to act was now.

The recovery that worked

We pursued two paths at once. On the retailer side, we filed a fraud report with the two gift-card issuers, attaching the receipts, the serial numbers, and a narrative showing the cards were purchased under coercion and had not been lawfully redeemed. Retailers can and do reverse or block un-redeemed cards when a credible fraud report lands before redemption completes. On the bank side, we opened a dispute on the card account that funded the purchases, arguing unauthorized-use and merchant-fraud, which put the funding bank on the hook for the portion it could claw back.

The two paths covered different ground. The retailer reversals recovered the un-redeemed cards; the bank dispute recovered the funding for the cards that had already been moved. Neither worked alone. Together, inside the redemption window, they recovered the bulk of the loss.

The outcome

Recovery closed in three weeks. The success fee was paid from the recovered amount, nothing was paid upfront.

What made the difference

• The serial numbers were kept. A gift-card reversal is a locate-and-block on specific cards. Without the serials, there is nothing to point at. The client's habit of keeping the receipts saved the case.
• We beat the redemption clock. The un-redeemed cards could only be saved before they were spent. Filing the retailer fraud report in days, not weeks, is what kept them recoverable.
• Two channels, one case. Retailer reversal and bank dispute reach different money. Running both meant the cards that had already been moved did not become a dead end.