Your shopping list may not be quite finished. But after weeks of shouldering through the holiday crowds — you certainly are.
So you decide gift cards are good enough to get you to the finish line.
That scene is so prosaic that the gift card has become an ubiquitous present in the culture, and is now one of the go-to options for many during the holidays. And it makes sense: they provide ready cash on a card to shop at favorite stores or dine at a favorite restaurant.
But there is a red alert this year — about a gift card scam that drains the cards customers later purchase.
It’s been around awhile, but is finally getting some notice.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn was among the victims of the latest holiday Grinch-worthy trick and talked about the problem at a morning news conference on Thursday, Dec. 21. The CVS store at Park Plaza Shopping Center on Western Avenue in San Pedro — where she purchased the card — was the backdrop for the media briefing.
Hahn said she’d purchased a Visa gift card for her nephew last week for his birthday. But when he tried to use the card for a purchase, it came up with a $0 balance.
“What I lost on this gift card I was easily able to repay in cash to my nephew,” Hahn said. “But I am worried about the people who are barely scraping by who can’t afford to be ripped off.”
The scam, known as “gift card draining,” can work a couple of ways:
- Scammers attach a barcode from a card they already have to an unsold gift card in a store. When someone buys the tampered card and loads money onto it, they are loading money onto the scammer’s card.
- A scammer steals the details off a legitimate gift card and then places it back on a store rack. The scammer can then track when the card is bought and loaded and quickly drain the money.
Hahn is calling on retailers to take proactive steps to better protect the open card racks by securing the merchandise behind glass or behind cash registers, sending the…
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