If you find a gift card, can you use it? No. Spending a gift card you found belongs to the same family of crimes as taking cash out of someone’s wallet, because the balance on the card is still that person’s money. Every state treats it as theft under one name or another, and your legal obligation when you pick the card up is to make a reasonable effort to return it before you do anything else with it.
Why Using a Found Gift Card Is Theft
Property law separates things that are lost from things that are abandoned. Abandoned property is something the owner deliberately threw away with no intention of getting it back, and a finder can keep it. Lost property is something the owner parted with by accident and still has a legal claim to. A gift card dropped on a store floor or in a parking lot is lost, not abandoned, because the law presumes nobody intentionally throws away something that holds money.
That distinction creates a duty. When you find lost property, most states require you to make a reasonable effort to return it to the owner before you treat it as yours. Walking off and spending the balance skips that step, and the skipping is what turns a lucky find into a crime.
There’s a related category that matters if you spot a card inside a business. Property set down and then forgotten, like a card left on a checkout counter or a restaurant table, is called mislaid property, and the law treats it as being in the custody of the business where it was left. Pocketing a card from a store counter is harder to defend than picking one up off the sidewalk, because the store already has a form of legal possession.
The practical complication is that most gift cards carry no name. A standard Visa or Mastercard gift card shows a 16-digit number and a security code and nothing else. Store-branded cards from retailers like Target or Starbucks are the same. You usually can’t identify the owner from the card itself, but that doesn’t erase your duty; it just shapes what counts as a reasonable effort. Handing the card to someone who might reunite it with the owner is the point, not conducting an investigation.
What You Can Be Charged With
The crime is sometimes called theft of lost property or larceny by finding. A prosecutor has to prove two things: that you knew or had reason to believe the card belonged to someone else, and that you intended to keep it permanently instead of returning it. Briefly holding a card while you look for the owner doesn’t meet that bar. Swiping it at a register does. The moment you use the card, you’ve created strong evidence of intent to keep it.
The severity of the charge depends mostly on the balance and your state’s threshold for separating misdemeanor theft from felony theft. Those thresholds vary widely. Some states draw the felony line as low as $200; others don’t escalate to a felony until the value reaches $2,500. A $50 card will almost always be a misdemeanor, with penalties typically including fines and up to a year in county jail. A card loaded with $1,000 or more can cross the felony line in many states, which opens the door to state prison time and a permanent criminal record.
Online use adds another layer. Entering a found card’s number on a website sends the transaction across state lines electronically, which brings federal wire fraud into theoretical reach. The statute makes it a crime to use interstate communications to carry out a scheme to obtain money or property through deception, with penalties of up to 20 years in prison.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 1343 – Fraud by Wire, Radio, or Television Federal prosecutors are not going to come after a single $40 purchase, but the exposure exists and can matter when gift card misuse is part of a larger pattern.
What to Do When You Find One
The simplest and most legally protective move is to hand the card to whoever runs the place where you found it. In a store, that’s customer service. In a restaurant, the host or manager. This is the first place a worried owner is going to check, and giving the card to that location satisfies your duty without asking anything heroic of you.
If you found the card somewhere without an obvious manager, like a sidewalk or a public parking lot, your local police department is the right fallback. Many departments accept found property and log it, which creates an official record that protects you if questions come up later. For a card with a high balance, the police route is the smarter choice, because the dollar amount could push a theft charge into felony territory if the card is ever traced back to you.
You can safely check the balance before turning the card in. Most gift cards have a toll-free number printed on the back, and network-branded cards usually let you check online by entering the card number and security code. Checking the balance is not using the card and creates no legal exposure. It just tells you how much is at stake and how urgently the owner is likely to come looking.
When You Can Legally Keep It
Many states have a process for finders who do the right thing. If you turn property over to the police and nobody claims it within a set waiting period, the finder gets it. Those periods vary by state and sometimes by the value of the property, but they typically run from 30 days to several months. That’s the clean path to legally keeping a found gift card: turn it in, wait it out, and let the process work.
Gift cards do have a wrinkle that cash doesn’t. Most states have unclaimed-property laws that require retailers to turn over dormant gift card balances to the state treasury after a set period of inactivity, typically three to five years, though some states use shorter windows.2National Conference of State Legislatures. Gift Cards and Gift Certificates Statutes and Legislation Once a balance escheats to the state, the original owner can still file a claim to recover it, but the physical card stops working. A card you find today might already be on that path, which is another reason checking the balance before you turn it in is useful.
Federal rules keep most found cards worth returning. The funds on a gift card have to remain available for at least five years from the date the card was issued or last loaded, and retailers can’t drain the balance through inactivity fees during the first year.3eCFR. 12 CFR 1005.20 – Requirements for Gift Cards and Gift Certificates A card someone loaded with $100 two years ago and then dropped almost certainly still holds that $100. That’s exactly why the law takes finding one seriously. It’s real money in plastic form, and spending it without permission is treated that way.