Don’t cut up that card! People mistaking stimulus debit card for junk mail

Imagine waiting for your stimulus payment and then accidentally cutting it up. That’s the mistake Bonnie Moore and her husband, Thomas, made after receiving it in the mail.

“My husband looked at it, briefly read it and he said, ‘Do you want this?’ And I said, ‘I don’t need another fake card,’ so he cut it up in little pieces,” she said.

The U.S. Treasury said last week that nearly four million people will get their stimulus payment by prepaid debit cards.

Moore says they were expecting their economic impact payment via direct deposit, not a debit card.

“The next thing you see is I am in the garbage can trying to pull out all of the pieces together, which did not work,” Moore said, “It looks like a bunch of little pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.”

She’s not the only one confusing the stimulus card for junk mail. Her neighbor, Jay Bender, almost tossed his too.

“You can feel there’s a credit card in there. I told my wife, ‘Hey honey, your payday loan came in the mail,'” Bender joked.

He says the issue is with the return address. It doesn’t say “U.S. Treasury” or “Internal Revenue Service,” but “Money Network Cardholder Services.”

“Doesn’t sound like the federal government to me,” Bender said.

If you don’t use the card carefully, you could get hit with a fee.

“I thought this came without strings and there are all kinds of fees if you don’t use it in the exact way prescribed,” Bender said.

One of the charges is $17 and it’s for a replacement card — something Moore hopes to avoid.

“I took a picture and I sent it to the stimulus website they gave us saying, ‘As you can see, I did not use it, I abused it. I promise I won’t do it again,'” Moore said.

For additional information on the stimulus prepaid debit card, click here.

For specifics on additional fees, how to access cash and to find out your balance, click here.