How To Redeem A Damaged iTunes Gift Card

In: Entertainment| Mac OS X| Tech| iPhone

7 Dec

Went a little overboard with the card scratching, eh?

Don’t Worry! Here’s How To Fix It!

Every year around the holidays the iTunes gift cards start rolling in. It’s a safe play for distant relatives, friends and colleagues. Needless to say, I’ve gingerly scratched the adhesive backing off many an iTunes gift card. That said, I wasn’t terribly surprised when this time around I scratched too hard and took the gift card’s secret code off with the adhesive. Perhaps I was due.

Granted, it was my fault, but I was out $25.

Moreover, I was relatively unsure of where to start and I had a lot of questions: Do I return it to the store where it was purchased? Should I contact Apple directly? Is getting reimbursed even a possibility?

I was happy to learn that, as suspected, my issue was not an isolated incident and Apple does have measures in place to assist consumers with recovering their iTunes gift card credit. Better yet, it required no phone calls or in-store visit and can be done entirely through iTunes.

How To Obtain The Secret Code

Within the iTunes Store select “Redeem” from the menu options.
Enter as much of the code as you can read and submit. This will produce an invalid code message. Keep attempting to submit the partial code until a “get help” message appears– it may take 5-6 attempts.
Once you have requested help you will be presented with a screen requesting your card’s serial number, activation number (which we can’t read) and your name/email.

Locate your serial number using the diagram in the image, then enter as much of the activation number as you can read– it’s OK if you can only make out a character or two.

That’s it! You should receive an email from Apple noting that they have received your support request and the issue should be resolved in less than 24-hours.

Much to my surprise, I had an email from iTunes Support the following morning providing me with the activation code I had inadvertently removed. Thanks, Apple!

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Tags: gift card, help, iTunes, lost code, redeem, scratched

8 Responses to How To Redeem A Damaged iTunes Gift Card

Spud

December 25th, 2009 at 5:08 pm

Thanks for the help. Just did what you suggested and I’m crossing my fingers!

Katy

December 29th, 2009 at 3:58 pm

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Didn’t even have to wait for an e mail, my account was credited immediately.

Darren

January 7th, 2010 at 7:52 am

Thanks for the tip!!! My I-tunes account was credited right away!!! Thanks again.

Blake

January 8th, 2010 at 9:26 am

Great! It seems as though the more digits you can see/enter, the more likely it is to credit it instantly. When I ran into this issue (and subsequently wrote the post), NONE of the digits aside from the standard “XX” were visible.