I am an idiot.
Got taken in on a scam and bought $300 in google play cards for a friend. Then learned his email account had been hijacked. Anyway- I have these cards, unactivated. Stores won’t take them back. And I can’t find anything but pop music and ebooks on the google store. Anybody know a way to cash these wretched things in or use them someplace else?
There’s others. You don’t get full value, usually 75% - 80%.
What was the scam?
Yikes. Google Play is discontinuing it’s music service pretty soon, so even if you liked their music offerings you’d be SOL on that.
Your best bet might be trying to sell the cards. People who do a lot of Android mobile gaming would be interested.
The music you have is supposed to port over to YouTube music. At least, that’s what the email they sent me says.
Can you use Google Play gift cards on YT Music?
yeah only good thing they’re good for these days are movies books or mobile games you could try a site like g2a they let people sell things like game codes
That I don’t know.
The scam was this: I got an email saying my friend was out of town with intermittent cell access(plausible here).Asked me to buy the cards for his neice and email him the activation codes. Then he could give them to her the next morning. This fit together well until I got the email asking for the activation codes…
I’ve heard of that one.
That’s just Google Play Music, though. Google Play is still the primary market for Android Apps.
Google Play used to be called “Android Market”. It’s kind of like the Apple App Store, but for Android phones. There are plenty of useful applications that might cost up to $10 or so. You can also buy movies, games, etc.
$300 is quite a bit of money, though. I can’t imagine you’d ever spend that much money on apps or games, unless you’re addicted to some Pay-to-Win game and you need to buy more gold stars or more dragons or something to protect your fort. If the cards don’t expire, and you have an Android phone, just deposit the money into your account. You might finally spend it all over the next 10 years or so.
Cardcash.com will buy them from you at a loss, but it’s better than nothing.
This was after some cursory searching. I make absolutely no claim about the safety or quality of the site.
Now that a few GQ answers have been forthcoming I hope it isn’t too threadshitty to ask… how is that scam ‘sold’ exactly? That is, if the email is based on your friend supposedly needing to get some money to his niece quickly, how do they justify it having to be in Google Play cards, specifically? - since, as you note, they’re only useful for a fairly limited set of things. And what was it about the email asking for the activation codes that tipped you off, since it sounds like ‘and then mail the activation codes’ was part of the initial request?
If you used a credit card then you might be able to get your money back through them.
The scam was sold very badly, but they had two pieces of good luck. First, I know that my friend’s family has members in a very rural and mountainous part of the state. The notion that he could be in a space with poor service made sense if he was there to visit her.
The second thing was that I was dumb as a bag of hammers and did not get suspicious until the rude reply came to my note warning him that sending the codes might not be a great plan from the security standpoint. Well duh. Buying the gift cards wasn’t so bright either…
These guys send thousands and thousands of emails every day. Every now and then they get lucky and hit the winning combo of “plausible circumstances” and “credulous recipient.”
Lesson learned, and next time you’ll be less credulous.
A good rule of thumb is that nobody but a scammer will ever ask you to buy them a gift card.
Do you have a streaming TV device, like Roku, FireTV, smart TV, etc? If so, you can use the cards to rent movies in the Google Play app.
So … takeaway for scammers - “always be polite”
(makes note) 
What denominations are the cards? I’d be willing to buy some of them (not the whole $300) if it helps. I use Google to store all my photos and files and rent movies, and you can use Play credits for that. PM me if you’re interested.
Edit: I think you can also use it to pay for YouTube Premium (remove ads) or YouTube TV (stream live TV on the web) if either sounds more appealing to you. Basically any Google subscriptions. Who knows, give them a few years and you might be able to back up your DNA too…