Gift card liquidation using Western Union Bill Pay

While many are familiar with the name Western Union for purchasing money orders at grocery stores, a lesser-known method for liquidating Visa gift cards is through their Bill Pay feature, which can specifically be done at Walgreens.

The process is straightforward - You pay a bill at your local Walgreens’ checkout counter using your gift card. Western union has a list of bill payment targets that they support, and (fortunately for us) this list includes targets like banks/credit unions and credit card companies. I generally rotate through a few local credit union checking accounts that I’ve found to be compatible with Western Union.

You can expect a fixed fee of around $5, but the fee will vary by bill pay target. After a 3-4 days, the transfer will appear in your recipient’s account.

The main challenges here are finding gift cards that are accepted by Walgreens, and finding MS-friendly bill payment targets. If you are able to solve both of these challenges, you should be able to scale this up to $10,000+ a month.

Finding a Biller

The first step, before heading to Walgreens, is to find a biller that is compatible with Western Union. You’ll visit the Western Union Bill Payment website, which lets you search for billers. I suggest searching for local credit unions in your area. This Doctor of Credit page is usually my starting point for finding credit unions, especially the comment section. After a while, you’ll hopefully find one.

As a quick plug, we have a community-maintained spreadsheet available to those in our Churner’s Lounge community, which lists over 50 billers that are compatible with Western Union Bill Pay.

Once you find a biller, you’ll be shown the cost of a bill payment. These are usually fixed fees, so I suggest sending $500+ to minimize the fee percentage.

Heading to Walgreens

Most Walgreens will support Western Union payments, but you can check whether your local store supports it on the Western Union map. For my location on the map, I see other stores like Safeway and Rite Aid in addition to Walgreens. My understanding is that only Walgreens works for accepting gift cards for a bill payment, but let us know in the comments if you know otherwise.

When I enter the store, I’ve made it a habit to ask the cashiers whether they are supporting Western Union payments that day, after having several occasions where the payment systems were down.

Then, you’ll head to the kiosk machine at their photo center. With that machine, you’ll be able to choose your target and the amount you want to pay. Remember that your payment will include your fees! So make sure you have enough funds in your gift card.

The kiosk will also require you to share your name and ID number. The great thing is that your ID number can be for anything - license, passport, green card, etc. Make sure you have the ID with you, since the cashier will need to confirm this for larger volumes ($1000+ in my experience).

Pro tip here, if you want to scale up to large amounts of Western Union liquidation, you can use different IDs, which the Western Union system will see as different accounts. I’ve read that you can slowly scale up to $15K per 30 days per account.

Once you confirm your transaction info at the machine, you’ll head over to the checkout register. You’ll let the cashier know that you want to do a “Western Union payment”. They’ll ask for your phone number to pull up your transaction request. After they review your ID, you'll complete your payment with your "debit card(s)". Don’t make a big deal about using gift cards, and you will be fine. What I’ve learned is that most associates just don’t care - they just want to wrap up for the day.

An important tip for scaling: Gift cards auto-drain at Walgreens. This means you can swipe multiple gift cards back-to-back to complete a large transaction. For example, you can swipe 3x$500 gift cards back to back for a $1,500 transaction.

Fees etc.

In-store payments come with a fixed fee of $4.99 for most billers, regardless of the payment amount. I believe the official daily limit for Western Union is $5,000, but it's advisable to keep transactions under $3,000, and the maximum limit you can reach is $15,000 within a 30-day period.

I personally do $1,500 per transaction, and alternate between two Western Union accounts that send to different credit unions.