I Received A $0.48 Stimulus Check. Here Is My Story.
This article will tell you of my experience with the third stimulus check and I will have another article that will tell you to step by step how to resolve not getting your stimulus check/EIP card or if your EIP card has missing money in it.
It is 2021, the second year of the COVID-19 Pandemic. The third stimulus checks were scheduled to be delivered around the end of March by the government. The 2 requirements for a $1400 stimulus check are completion of your 2020 taxes and an adjusted gross income (AGI) requirement of one of the following:
- Individuals earning a maximum of $80,000
- Head of Households earning a maximum of $120,000
- Marriage Households filing jointly earning a maximum of $160,000
As an individual who earned less than $80,000 during the 2020 year, I qualified for the third round of stimulus checks. However, I ran into several problems along the way.
Stimulus Check Never Arrived
I checked the status of my stimulus check at the IRS website. I simply clicked the Get My Payment button, then I filled in the necessary fields and the status of my stimulus check said that it was delivered on March 26, 2021. It had been over a month since the IRS website said the payment was scheduled. So I was confident that the stimulus check didn’t get lost in the mail.
Upon finding out that the stimulus was sent, I called the IRS. I suggest not doing this because the phone lines are backed up every day to the point that the machine will just hang up on you and they won’t be able to help you. What I did and what you are going to want to do if you have NOT received your stimulus check is to call the Money Network at 1–800–240–8100 and request a new card. The Money Network is the company that issues out the Economic Impact Payment Cards otherwise known as the stimulus checks in the form of a VISA card.
About a week went by before I received the new EIP card. I did as the card instructed and created a new account for the EIP card, where I should be able to access my $1400. What do you know… I have $0.48 on my new EIP card.
The following process was annoying and took a while…
The Annoying Dispute Form
As soon as I saw the $0.48 and the transactions used on the card, I called The Money Network customer service line at the same number about the card, and of course, there is a long procedure on how to deal with these things. I spoke to a representative on what to do to get my missing $1399.52. Let’s just round up to the whole $1400 for the sake of this article. According to The Money Network’s representative, I needed to create a dispute form in order to “dispute” the charges made on the card. Basically, prove that It wasn’t me who put the charges on the card. I spoke to the representative for over an hour to make sure I got all the details I needed in order to create this dispute form as well. I have listed the criteria the representative told me down below…
*WARNING!! DO NOT USE THE FOLLOWING PROCEDURE IF THIS HAS HAPPENED TO YOU. THIS IS NOT THE FINAL CRITERIA!**
YOU CAN FIND THE CRITERIA FOR THE DISPUTE FORM IN THIS ARTICLE
1. Handwritten on BLANK 8½ sheet paper
2. Faxed
3. Card Number
4. First and Last Name
5. Address, City, State Zip
6. Cell Phone Number
7. Date the form is created
8. Transaction of the charges on the card which include the date, amount, and merchant description
9. Who has possession of the EIP card
10. Concise explanation of why this needs to be disputed, and what happened exactly during those time periods.
11. Fax Number: 1–402–916–8249
12. A waiting period of up to 45–90 days
I did exactly as mentioned and even put Google Maps mobile history attachments for the dates that the transactions on my cards were made so that I can prove I wasn’t at any of the locations the transactions were made. I waited about three weeks before calling back and found out that my dispute form was not even in the system…
I called back The Money Network and talked to a different representative. The representative told me that I did almost everything right. He explained I was missing an ID number. An ID number that the previous representative was supposed to give me. Why was this ID number important? Well, the ID number would link my dispute form with the online profile that The Money Network has on me. Crucial, don’t you think? I even found out that they can mail you a template so that you don’t have to write everything from scratch. After talking more with the representative I found out a few more things that the first representative neglected to tell me. The first representative failed to mention that the card number that we have to write down on the form is not referring to the new card that they reissued me, but the original card that I never received. This means that the status of the card would also be “lost” or “not in my possession.”Those are the different things that the first representative failed to mention and are what rendered my original form incomplete. In addition, each fax costs me $22 because I do not own a fax machine and had to go to Kinkos to fax.
After these corrections, I faxed it again. Finally, after a couple of weeks, I received a mail saying that my dispute form was approved and that the $1400 was transferred into the account. Needless to say, I transferred that money into my bank account right away.
TLDR Bullets
- My stimulus check/EIP card was used by someone else.
- I had to call The Money Network to figure out how to get my money back.
- Handwrote a dispute form multiple times due to terrible customer service the first time.
- Got my $1400 back after the dispute form was approved.
- To learn how to resolve this issue on your own read this article for more details.
