Gameflip – A step by step guide to getting Instawatch refunds
This might be of assistance to some of us on here.
I firstly emailed gameflip (
[email protected] ) explaining that various Vudu instawatch movies bought from them were removed from my Vudu account at the end of June.
The response from gameflip after a couple of days was:
____
Thank you for contacting us. We are very sorry to hear about this issue.
Please reply to this message with full screen unedited and uncropped screenshots of:
1. The name of movie/s removed and the Purchase ID's
2. Your Vudu account's "My Movies" sections where the movie should appear. https://www.vudu.com/content/movies/mymovies?SORT_ORDER=A%20-%20Z
3. Your Vudu account's "Purchase History" section where the movie should appear.
4. Email from Vudu support confirming which movie was removed from your Library and the reason for removal.
[email protected]
Vudu support will confirm the movies were removed due to being redeemed on an incorrect Vudu account and allow us to issue a refund or credit.
Once we receive this information we will be able to process your refund or credit as soon as possible.
____
I then emailed Vudu with an extremely brief and non-specific query, simply saying I’d noticed some of my movies had recently disappeared and was curious as to when they would return.
Vudu didn’t immediately reply to that, or a chase up email, so I logged into my Vudu account, found a record of the outstanding query sitting in my Account Overview/Questions screen, and sent a chase up via that method. They then replied the same day (via email as well as via Account Overview) as follows:
____
Thank you for contacting Vudu Customer Care.
I am sorry to hear you had these titles deleted from your account, I will provide additional information.
As of June 29, 2020, Vudu is no longer accepting any Instawatch purchases made through Walmart.com. We are taking new measures regarding our Instawatch redemption program.
It has been brought to light that some accounts have InstaWatch titles missing from their account. If titles were removed, the titles were not redeemed to the Walmart account that purchased the discs.
If you have proof the Instawatch content was bought from your Walmart.com account, please forward us your Walmart.com order confirmation, and we will gladly escalate your case to our higher level of support for further review. If you no longer have the proof of purchase, unfortunately, we are unable to escalate your case.
If you have any other questions or need further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us.
Best Regards,
____
From the above wording it is clear that this is just a standard ‘copy and paste’ reply, they are not interested in investigating or ‘punishing’ account holders for breaching their Instawatch rules, just in closing out the query. This is supported by similar reports on Reddit by people who’ve done the same thing, and received the same response, so I wouldn’t worry about contacting Vudu.
So I then took screenshot of that, as well as relevant Vudu purchase history and My Movies sorted by A to Z, etc, and sent everything back, including movie name and gameflip purchase ref nos, as a reply to their initial instructions email.
After a week gameflip replied saying they would refund 18 out of the 22 movies that I’d listed in my first email (they didn’t say why they didn’t want to refund the other five, and I’m not arguing). These purchases were all cancelled and the credit is now back in my gameflip account wallet. I have just submitted a second email containing a batch of a further 44 missing movies so I’ll see how that goes.
By the way, while checking gameflip account I did notice that the monthly $2 ‘bonus credit’ that has been regularly added to accounts expires a week later if it has not been used.