Wachovia gift card ripoff

What a ripoff a Wachovia gift card is. The person giving it to you pays cash for it, but after 12 months Wachovia charges you $2.50 a month as a service fee and deducts it from the card until all the money on the card is taken back by Wachovia. Why would you need to have a service fee if you are not using any service? Well, the answer is: so Wachovia can keep all the money on the card. I love laissez faire economics. There is also no telephone number on the card, and no easy access from the website to check the balance on the card. If you have $100 on the card, and the purchase is $107 with tax, the purchase gets declined. Ideally it would take the $100 on the card and the register would say that you owe $7 in cash. The only reason to not do that is to make it hard to use the card so that the $2.50 monthly fee starts to kick in.