I purchased a gift card from the Kroger by me and within two days, all the funds had been spent, save for a few dollars. How did the culprit obtain the info as well as the PIN that I set? It was one of the gift cards that’s allegedly safe because the barcode is hidden, but clearly that’s untrue.
Edit: it wasn’t an exposed gift card, I had to tear it away from a perforated envelope of cardboard and then scan it myself through self-checkout. It was one of them that is enclosed in cardboard packaging to prevent any numbers from being exposed.
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Gift card fraud is a moving target. Back when online redemption was still new, it used to be that most gift card fraud was insiders, usually store employees, who would copy the redemption codes for a batch of gift cards, then launder them so it wouldn’t be obvious who the fraudster was. Then the gift card issuers started requiring cashiers to activate the gift card at the point of sale before it’s valid. I’m out of touch, so I don’t know how it works now.
Source: worked at Google on Billing SRE. We weren’t directly responsible for anti-fraud detective work, but we’d often get asked to retain or extract information about known or suspected fraudsters for Google Legal and/or local police. At one point we were tangentially involved in some anti-fraud work with the Google Play Store physical gift cards, back when those were brand new.
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