I bought a $100 vanilla visa gift card at target in person with cash over 2 days ago. I have the receipt and everything. I tried it out on several online retailers even amazon. They all declined. Whenever I go to https://www.vanillagift.com/ to activate my card, it still doesn't work because after I enter everything in and pass the captcha robot check, it says "system error, please make sure you aren't using a vpn and are logging in from the US blah blah blah"

And yes, I've tried entering stuff on that website using a computer, a tablet, and a phone. NOTHING works. I do not have a vpn or any extention activated and I do live in the US. I tried calling and all that answers is a bot, I don't know if there's some sort of thing I should wait for before entering anything but let me know if there's anything important I should know about that.

I even tried giftcard.com to activate my card and it's as if my card doesn't exist.

I know there's a sufficient balance in there because when I go to mybalancenow.com it says my card is active, it has $100 in there, and shows all my failed transactions. So I genuinely don't know.

The one thing I haven't tried is go back to target and ask about it but I don't know if I should do that because you can't return vanilla gift cards. It's weird because the card SHOULD have been activated already. The reciept says something along the lines of it being activated. But whenever I use that card online, it DOESN'T work. I haven't tried it in person but I just don't know.

Has anyone had some similar issues? I refuse to let $100 go to waste. And if you know anything that might help, please let me know.