My grocery store carries Hallmark Venmo cards, which are really cool. They’re normal greeting cards, but inside is a QR code that the sender scans. It goes to their Venmo app, they enter how much money they’d like to give the recipient, and the QR code captures that info. The recipient gets the card, scans the code, and that much money goes into their Venmo account.
I saw the display and thought they sounded like fun. And they are! But this is what happened: I mailed one to my sister (a few states away) on September 12. She hadn’t received it by September 29, so, assuming it had gotten lost in the mail, I purchased, loaded, and sent her a second one.
Then the first card arrived at my sister’s house. On October 1. Nineteen days after I had mailed it. And it was in pristine condition, as if it had taken two days.
We figure it’s just one of those things, must have gotten stuck in the mailbag or something. And we begin to wait to see when the second card arrives.
NOVEMBER 13. Forty-four days after I mailed it. Again, pristine, as though nothing unusual had happened.
Any guesses? Is the QR code inside somehow messing with the post office’s scanners? What could be happening here?
There is lots of shitty postal service out there these days. At your end or at her end, or anywhere in the middle.
Another possibility is that somebody somewhere in the USPS knows how to recognize these cards and they divert them in an attempt to somehow drain the money themselves.
Has your sister successfully downloaded your money to her account yet from one or both cards?
ETA: Did you mean to put this in Café Society? If you’d like it moved, just report your OP and in the explanation box ask a mod to move it.
Oh, thanks. Meant to put it in MPSIMS. I’ll report it.
Yep, my sister successfully downloaded the money in both cards (which I actually didn’t expect, but hadn’t yet gotten to canceling payment on the second card). I’ll take a look at the envelope next time I’m at the store to see if they’re somehow labeled as Venmo cards.
I agree, just grasping at straws here. It’s a solid red envelope.
I mean, I know the mail service can suck, but I mail a lot of letters and cards and this has never happened to me before. I wouldn’t think anything of it if it had only happened to one of the two cards.
Probably just a coincidence that it happened twice.
Although supposedly sometimes someone picks greeting cards out of the mail because they may contain cash (as in the stereotypical birthday card from grandma with five bucks cash in it). Though in that case, the card would never get to the destination or if it did, it would have been obviously tampered with.
If the greeting card was diverted by a would-be USPS thief in hopes it had cash, and once they opened it they found it didn’t have cash, they’d be smarter to send it on its way than to destroy it. The less total mail disappears, the longer they can count on getting away with skimming the comparatively few greeting cards that do have cash.
As to the second point, somebody who takes the time to learn can open and reseal ordinary envelopes with very, very little evidence they’ve been in there. Certainly security envelopes exist that are nearly impossible to open without leaving obvious evidence. Good bet these cards aren’t that.
I only send money through the mail if I absolutely have to, and in that case I send a check. I’ve never really felt comfortable sending money through the mail. There are too many things that can go wrong, and not necessarily someone stealing the money.
When I was a kid it took two days to send a letter coast-to-coast and cost less than a quarter. Now it takes at least a week to get a piece of mail from Montana to California, and sometimes it takes two weeks, and on one occasion it never arrived. Email has solved almost all of my mail issues.