Story Of The Returned $10,000 Walmart Debit Card May Be Hoax

Green Dot, the company that services Walmart MoneyCard accounts, says an investigation gives it reason to believe this may be a hoax.

Earlier today, we told you about the odd story of a man in Alabama who claimed to have found a Walmart prepaid debit card containing more than $10,000 on it, and who says he did the right thing by trying to return it to the store. However, the more we learn about this story the more questions come up.

Initially, there was some confusion involved with Walmart’s response to the story as a rep for the company claimed the card could not hold more than $1,000. As we noted in our original story, that appears to have been the result of some confusion because people kept referring to it as a “gift” card, which would be subject to $1,000 limit. However, this is a Walmart MoneyCard, and users of those accounts can add up to $2,999/day to their card.

But as we dig deeper, some issues come to light. The card in the image is indeed a Walmart MoneyCard, but it’s the “dummy” card that you first get when you start an account at the store. You can tell by the “Valued Customer” name.

Once a MoneyCard user has gone through a verification process to confirm their ID, they can get the personalized card and then add the larger amounts to their account. However, further inspection of the MoneyCard terms [PDF] show that the “The overall maximum amount of value that can reside on the Card is $7,500.”

Even if there are ways around that maximum, there’s the issue of the man claiming to have checked the balance on the card. Multiple sources have told us he should not be able to do this without a PIN for the card, which calls into question the authenticity of the receipt seen in the image above.

We reached out to Walmart to discuss these issues and ended up speaking to Green Dot, the company that is actually responsible for servicing the MoneyCard.

Citing privacy policies, Green Dot could not provide any specific information about this account but did say that their investigation currently gives them reason to believe that this is a hoax.