If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you might not be aware that Nintendo is shutting down its customer rewards program, Club Nintendo. While initially conceived as a rewards program in Japan as early as 2003, the program didn’t launch in the United States until 2008. Despite that, some pretty great rewards have been offered over the years, but Nintendo announced earlier this year that it is shutting down the service on March 31,2015. That leaves until the end of the month for users to cash out any coins they have saved up.
Some enterprising people decided to try and maximize their coin gains by taking codes that are legitimate and changing single numbers until they work, there by surpassing the need to have purchased a new product. It’s gaming the system and the exploit got so popular that some people were taking to eBay to sell off “generated” codes to people looking to redeem coins before the final closure date for Club Nintendo.
Now that the exploit has been uncovered and Nintendo removed the Wii mini from being able to generate coins on Club Nintendo, it seems like they’re actively going after accounts that used the exploit and banning them, preventing them from redeeming any of their coins whether they were legit or not. There are numerous reports on reddit of people who have had their accounts deactivated and being unable to access them. This applies only to the Club Nintendo account, so people aren’t losing their Nintendo Network ID, but for people who had tons of coins saved up with only a few extra coins needed, it’s certainly a harsh lesson to learn.
If you’re one of the people considering purchasing Club Nintendo codes on eBay in order to fill out your coins for a certain reward, you may want to think twice before doing it as you could be receiving one of these exploited codes that will no longer work and you will have wasted your money.
