Lakewood NJ – Two Orthodox Jewish Men Build Multimillion Dollar Business With Unwanted Gift Cards

Lakewood, N.J. – They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Or in this case, a $56 million treasure for two Orthodox Jewish men from Brooklyn.

Elliot Bohm, 33, and Marc Ackerman, 31, are cofounders of the gift card company CardCash.com, which buys and resells unwanted gift cards reports Forbes (http://onforb.es/1sNgA2R).

Right now, they have approximately $3 million worth of gift cards waiting to be purchased.

Launched in 2008, the two men started buying other people’s cards online for a few dollars less than their original value, then sold the cards for a few dollars more than they paid for them. Presently, CardCash.com nets about an 8 percent profit and is estimated to gross about $120 million by the end of 2014.

Gift cards are a booming business. According to CEB Tower Group, consumers will spend $79 billion on e-gifts and gift cards.

Before founding CardCash.com, Bohm sold discounted electronics, and Ackerman worked in real estate and traded stocks on the side – experience that grossly helped CardCash work with price fluctuations.

Receiving their own unwanted gift cards one holiday season, the two men wanted to sell them and discovered there weren’t many trustworthy options online to do that – so they decided to start their own.

Combining Bohm’s wedding money and Ackerman’s stock market rewards, loans from family and friends and 18-hour days in Bohm’s basement, they’ve built CardCash.com into a competitive and money-making company. CardCash employs 100 workers, with 80 of them based in Lakewood and about a dozen coders located in Tel Aviv, Israel; Gurgaon, India; and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

In May, CardCash purchased one of its main rivals, Plastic Jungle.

And in a business where fraud is the number one concern, CardCash limits its liability by using fraud-recognition programs and device fingerprinting technology to identify questionable customers. It also collects transaction data to be investigated for spikes in activity from particular buyers, sellers or retailers.

Last November, Guggenheim Partners gave CardCash a $6 million boost that is being used for marketing, Google video ads and radio and TV marketing to get the word out about CardCash.com.

Information taken from Forbes.com