3V cards no longer accepted by National Savings, utilities, council tax and HMRC

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• Jamed67 says:

  13 Dec13 December 07:49

  Do they sell vpu jers for other supermarkets? I think it is time to err on side of caution so far as prchasing 3V cards for a while to we see if remaining utilities dry up too.

• Clive J says:

  13 Dec13 December 07:54

  This is probably why I found some in the infamous ‘Google Streetview’ Tesco in Watford at the weekend. Bought 8 but unfortunately still sitting on them :-[

• Dan says:

  13 Dec13 December 07:56

  Sad times 🙁 It’s been fun, but I have had a few problems with purchasing cards recently. At 2 different Tesco Extra stores I’ve had inactivated cards amongst the activated cards yet still been charged for them. I spent over 2 hours with customer services and managers in one branch to sort it out and they eventually gave me a £425 refund in cash (they couldn’t think of another way to do it but I suppose it was the best outcome for me) and didn’t take away my clubcard points. I haven’t faced going back to the second branch yet where £75 worth of cards didn’t activate, so unfortunately I’m still sitting on a handful of unspent cards.

  • Peter says:

    13 Dec13 December 08:31

    I’ve had this. They can now only put 5 gift cards through in the same transaction apparently – but the systems still charge you for the ones that don’t activate. Customer Services knew about the limit but struggled to work out how to refund me too.

    • davefl says:

      13 Dec13 December 09:43

      That’s not true. I bought 10 in Tesco yesterday, all one transaction, no subtotal after each.

      All activated perfectly. Just gutted now I can’t pay them into NSandI.

      • Peter says:

        13 Dec13 December 10:57

        There’s something going on, whether individual stores are doing something different I don’t know. But I put 8 through, with difficulty at the till and ended up having to go to customer services because 3 failed but it looked like they had gone through as I’d been charged. Customer services straight away said there was a limit of 5 cards. This tied in with the fact that I’d eventually had 5 go through , 3 failures and a charge of 200 on my receipt. It was far from enjoyable, the staff were concerned how they were going to balance the books.

        • davefl says:

          13 Dec13 December 15:36

          The trouble is that the staff at different branches feed whatever rubbish they like to placate the customer. Even different staff at the same branch have different ideas.

          I had a rant at my local extra at 2am the other day after a 5 hours/300 mile drive when the guy monitoring the self scan refused to open a checkout so I could use my X off Y coupon against two of the £50 visa cards. Management policy/more than his job was worth apparently.
          2 mins later after I’d just dropped the cards on the belt and walked over to scan my milk, supervisor walks over, drags me to a checkout and says “I’ve told him before, it’s fine and he should just call someone”

          They will feed you anything for an easy life. It’s been proved time and time again by people on the boards that there is no limit.

          The fee based visa from tesco goes straight into NS&I still (dont even need to register it online)
          Unfortunately as I found to my cost at sainsburys yesterday their fee-based one (myvanillaprepaid) doesn’t go into NS&I, doesnt work on HSV and Sainsburys spend x get Y off vouchers dont work against them as their IT is better than Tesco.

          That bit of knowledge cost me £3.

      • Shuttle says:

        13 Dec13 December 11:06

        I bought 16 yesterday (2 different transactions) and no probs at all, all activated fine, and now paid into Sky. Sounds like they are making up their policy on this as they go along!

    • Susan says:

      13 Dec13 December 10:15

      In Tesco Extra at the Forth Bridge last week none of my 24 activated. Customer Services managed to put them through in groups of 2 only – anything more declined to activate.

• Rich says:

  13 Dec13 December 08:01

  Interesting.
  I wondered why they seemed to gone completely.

  There still have to be some uses for these as detailed above- unlikely to be as easy as NS&I but I suspect it’s partly because we didn’t look for them……

  Anyone ever looked into the virtual debit card terminals you can get to accept payments if you have a small business?
  Sure there are reasons why it won’t work but you never know….

  • takke says:

    13 Dec13 December 09:36

    This might work – though they generally have charges of 2.75% and they might not be too happy with you doing a lot of transactions like that. It’s something I might try out, though – I have a couple of those readers that I got free from some promotions

• jason says:

  13 Dec13 December 08:03

  Lucky escape paid into hmrc on Wednesday night

• Magarathea says:

  13 Dec13 December 08:09

  I had a 3v transaction to my local council (Harrogate) declined last night BUT then tried putting this through as a credit card transaction with a 37p fee for a £24.63 payment and it worked! Anyone else tried this? Looks as if 3v have now done something with there cards to make them look like VISA credit cards as opposed to VISA debit cards.

  • Blackberryaddict says:

    13 Dec13 December 10:20

    I just tried this with my local authority, but that didn’t work

• craig says:

  13 Dec13 December 08:24

  I found no less than 16 3v cards at a Tescos a couple of weeks ago. I tried to buy 4 with the intention of using 2 of those vouchers from the Tesco xmas magazine mentioned on this site, however the sale of all 4 cards failed. When the supervisor came over he said there was a problem witth all 3v cards and they wouldn’t be able to sell them – the next day they’d been removed from the shelves.

• mrtibbs1999 says:

  13 Dec13 December 08:25

  Can I ask why anyone would pay to merge them? Sign up with Izettle, get a free, no ongoing fee merchant account and then send yourself the money at 2.75%. Works out about 70p a card. I have the full chip and pin set-up and using some of my naughtier schemes, you can make big bank with the fee paying tesco visa. Think Adwords, Uber, Free Trials…….

  • biscuiteer says:

    13 Dec13 December 08:38

    How would that work? The card reader is chip and pin – there’s no Chips on the 3V cards.

    I’m a tad annoyed as I’ve got 120 Tesco’s vouchers carefully cut out waiting for an assault. Luckily there were no 3V cards in any of the Tesco’s stores I visited yesterday. Had their been I would have been buying some pretty spectacular Christmas presents through Amazon this year!

  • M says:

    13 Dec13 December 09:08

    It won’t work. It’s a virtual card.

    • mrtibbs1999 says:

      13 Dec13 December 09:15

      All Wrong. There is an option to type the number in. If you’d spent 5 minutes looking into it though you’d know that.

      • biscuiteer says:

        13 Dec13 December 09:57

        OK – so you’re saying providing you use the terminal and key the number in you can keep the fees down to a minimum?

        • Mrtibbs1999 says:

          13 Dec13 December 12:03

          Yes

      • Andy young says:

        13 Dec13 December 13:16

        This is correct. When 3V first came to the fore I used my Izettle account to rinse them through. I had £60 Izettle credit to work through.
        You need to have a smart phone or at least one that can view a web page because a text with a link to go to is sent to your phone number

        • mrtibbs1999 says:

          13 Dec13 December 17:35

          I use Izettle for my aa credit card. If I smash 60k through it In one month I can have 2 first class singles from AUH to LHR with no tax 😉 Fees are £900, not the cheapest but £450 each for 5k flights is fine to me!

  • Lady London says:

    13 Dec13 December 14:27

    As a merchant, would you not then be approached by HMRC wanting tax for your revenues received as a merchant?

    • mrtibbs1999 says:

      13 Dec13 December 17:32

      Tax is on profits. You are making a loss. The word “merchant” is irrelevant for our purposes. Without writing a treatise that is all you need to know. No tax implications. Unless you are doing it on a monster scale!!!

  • Singing Dwarf says:

    19 Dec19 December 14:48

    But the card reader costs £99 inc VAT from their website – I have seen it available for £83 inc VAT elsewhere, but still a big upfront bill and then 2.75% fee on each transaction (as you say, almost 70p card).

    I have found other virtual payment gateways which charge 2.5% per transaction (i.e. 62.5p on a £25 transaction) – with no setup fee or monthly charge.

    Assuming two £25 3Vs are purchased from Tesco earning 250 points, this works out at a little over 0.1p per Avios by my calculations (assuming the payment gateway is not blocked by Raphaels Bank!).

    • Singing Dwarf says:

      19 Dec19 December 14:52

      Sorry – bad math!

      Two £25 3Vs would earn 350 CC points (150 + 2×100)
      This is equivalent to 840 Avios
      Or 0.078p per Avios – more of a bargain!

    • pazza2000 says:

      19 Dec19 December 16:23

      Do all of these virtual payment gateways work? If so, I suspect there will be a point, similar to where is sounds like Sky is at now, that they put a stop to allowing 3V transactions.

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