Bodog payout followup

A month ago I told you about getting a prepaid Visa card from Bodog instead of a check. Now I can tell you the rest of the story.

I had to log onto a web site to activate the card. This proved frustrating for reasons too arcane to detail, but I gave up for a while, and the card just sat on my desk. Finally this week I got around to tackling it again. Bodog did not respond to my email to their help desk, so I called them. They hadn't given me the code that I needed to activate the card, nor the PIN with which I could use it at an ATM. They said they did, I told them they didn't, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it finally got worked out, and I got the card activated.

First attempt to cash out at an ATM was a fail. This was my fault. I had not read carefully the instructions that came with the card. Strangely, you have to go into the "savings account" menu at the ATM, which is not what I expected. I tried both the "checking account" and "credit card" options, then gave up when those didn't work. Who would think that a prepaid card would be considered a savings account by the system?

So I went home and RTFM, as they say.

Second try, I asked for the full $300 in cash. It wouldn't give it to me. The obvious thing would be to check the balance first, because it might have changed due to currency exchange rate fluctuations. But the printed instructions had warned me that I would not be able to check the balance at an ATM; it said you have to use the web site for that. Which is why I didn't try it. Also, somebody was waiting behind me to use the machine, and I didn't want to be the jerk that holds up another person's errands because I couldn't figure out how to do a transaction. In frustration, I tried another cash request, this time for just $100, to see if it would give me anything. It did, though it deducted $3 for a service fee. It then asked if I wanted to know the remaining balance, which surprised me because of the previous warning. I pressed "yes," and it told me I had $183.48 left.

That means that my original $300 had drifted down to $286.48 between when Bodog's partner financial company issued the card and when I got around to actually using it. That's a 5% loss.

Today I went back for Round 3. This time I checked the balance first, which worked just fine, despite the stupid papers they had sent me: $181.56. I lost another two bucks overnight! (Let me take this opportunity to send a big upraised middle finger to the Obama administration for continuing its insane policies that are continuously devaluing the dollar.) Because of the $3 service charge, I wouldn't be able to take out $180 in cash. Since it would only take requests in increments of $20, I settled for $160.

Before leaving, I did one final balance check. The answer: $8.43 left on the card. That surprised me. $181.56 minus $160 minus a $3 service charge should have left me $18.56. Somehow, an extra $10.13 vanished without a trace. I have no idea what happened to it.

What I do know is that, in all, my original $300 actually translated to $260 in my pocket plus about $8 on the card. OK, the second $3 fee was my fault for not figuring out how to do it all at once. But even if you ignore that, the net result is that I lost a minimum of $29 on the deal, 10% of what my payout should have been.

This reveals three of the problems with using the card instead of a check: (1) You risk losing substantial value with movements in the exchange rate. (2) If you go for cash, you're hit with fees for each transaction. (3) It's really hard to use up the last bit of the money you have on account--at least in cash. Maybe, maybe, next time I buy something online I can use part of all of this, but I think that will be hard to get the last bit out. Most likely some small amount will be left there, like the last few pennies that you can't shake out of the piggy bank. Not exactly life-changing money here, but still annoying.

Hey, Bodog--if you're taking a customer satisfaction poll on this new idea, put me down as "against."