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Selling unwanted gift cards online is a huge scammer magnet. I tried to sell a $50 card for $40 recently and wasted a bunch of time with people sending me fake PayPal confirmation messages. Thankfully all of the scammers were pretty stupid and it was easy to tell when they were scamming.

It's just super risky on both sides so very few legitimate buyers want to do it since as a seller you could be giving them fake or used codes.

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Good startup idea then to build an escrow service for this? I.e. buy discount cards for 80% of face value, sell them for 90% of face value, and then act as the trusted middle man to verify that the card is good and that payment was made.

Not sure if any KYC/AML or other banking regulations would make this less economically viable.

How do you verify the card is good before redeeming it?

There’s already several sites like this, or at least there was a few years ago. I think some of them went under due to (big surprise) getting scammed. It’s too easy to just keep the numbers, sell the physical gift card to the company, then use them online after a month or two.

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