A troubling trend that has developed over the last few years has been States extending their unclaimed property laws to apply to gift cards, which means stealing away the free money that retailers thought they were entitled to when consumers didn’t use up their gift cards.  Many states now do this.  I have always assumed that states make little to no effort to find the rightful owners of the gift card money.

But it is actually worse than that.

According to a recent study done by CardHub.com, some states are actually requiring information in addition to the gift card number for consumers to claim their funds, information such as the name of the person who purchased the card and the credit card number used to purchase it.

Which begs the question, if the state has this information, why doesn’t it try to return the money.  For that matter, if the retailer had this information, why didn’t it try to contact the customer?