AT&T Rewards Center - Customer Service Agent claimed my reward without my permission

I recently switched back to AT&T Fiber from Xfinity. I was told I would get (up to) $200 gift card to my place of my choice and they would also reimburse me for the Xfinity Early Termination Fee.

I got the email for the rewards center and logged in and it saw I had the option for $150 gift card to different places, and I was gonna wait until my husband got home from work and decide which place we wanted to redeem it to. I didn’t see anything about uploading the final bill for Xfinity though, so I called the reward center number to get information about that.

After I got the information I needed and got off the call, I saw on the rewards center website that the reward had been claimed for a Visa gift card that would get mailed to me. Apparently during that call the agent redeemed my reward. I called back and another agent told me that even though it wasn’t me who claimed it, once it’s been claimed they can’t reverse it or cancel it or anything.

I wouldn’t be too upset if it had been anything other than a Visa gift card (which are a pain to use most of the time). I was also informed that if I don’t spend the full $150 within 6 months it will expire. Are there seriously no overrides or controls in place to prevent possibly fraudulent reward claims? Like I wasn’t the one who claimed it and I didn’t ask the agent to claim it for me. What if I didn’t live at the service address or I was out of the country for a period of time without access to my mail?

I don’t really want to get the original agent in any kind of trouble since it might just boil down to a miscommunication, but does anyone know if there is a way to possibly escalate this and get it reversed?