These are often found at any place that sells gift cards like gas stations, grocery stores and pharmacies.

They seemingly come in Visa and Mastercard flavours with varying amounts.

It said it needed to be registered at their website before usage, which I did. I then tried to use it on Steam (popular PC gaming online store for those not aware). I got a credit card declined error. Confused why I would, I went to the website on the card again and checked the balance. The balance was there in full, which was the amount I was trying to add to my Steam account.

I went back to the website to run through the registration again because now I was second guessing that I ever did it in the first place (never received an email confirmation or anything like that). Upon trying to register, I just received an "unknown" error. I figured it was a temporary issue with their system and that I'd try the next day. Nope, same issue again.

I then decided to call their customer service to try to get the issue rectified. It took me around 10 minutes to actually figure out how to talk to an agent. Their phone system is either broken or just purposely poorly designed to prevent you from actually getting through to somebody.

After finally getting an agent, they told me that the place I was trying to purchase from was a recurring subscription and that it would not be possible to use the card in this way. I tried to explain to them that this is indeed a one time purchase (it's an action to add funds to your account), but obviously there's nothing they'd be able to do about that.

I then decided maybe if I added the card to my paypal account and tried to charge from paypal that it'd go through. This was hit with another declined charge. The agent then told me that I tried to charge to a "european vendor" and that the card did not allow transactions over $75. I asked for clarification if it was $75/transaction or $75/vendor total. They explained that it was per transaction. I then finally successfully charged 2 x $50 to my account.

That was a lot of time and effort spent on something as simple as trying to use money that somebody else has already paid for.

On top of all of this, it cost the person that gave me this gift card of $100 a fee of $5.95 CAD. If that wasn't already a rip off, the company will start deducting $3/month after 12 months of it being activated. Also consider that these gift cards are almost impossible to generally fully drain through online vendors, leading to wasted money.

Do yourself a favour, just e-transfer the money instead. It's free these days at any bank worth having your money in and it's real money that people don't have to jump through hoops to use.