I was discussing different scam techniques I have heard of/seen with my husband the other day. I wondered out loud… “what do these guys do with iTunes or whichever gift cards they get?” Obviously they are not shopping at the Apple Store?
He said they have a way to get the money out of them, but didn’t know how it worked. I assume he’s right… now I am curious how does this happen, and why can’t apple or google make it harder for the scammers to use their gift cards?
EDIT – lots of good explanations! I was talking specifically about gift card scammers who convince their victims over phone/email/text to purchase gift cards and send them the activated codes. TIL there are many ways to use gift cards to scam ppl.
In: Technology
They have gift cards. They buy high value, easy to resell items with those gift cards (expensive electronics, etc) and sell them for deep discounts to launder the money. Or just cash them out on gift card resale/trade sites.
Its why if you see someone selling “brand new” iphones, macbooks, whatever on craigslist for an obscenely low price, it’s a scam. The items may be legit, but they’re selling so cheap because they’re laundering money. Lot of “work from home and make easy money” scam jobs too where they hire unwitting people to act as shipping intermediaries to help legitimize their online sales (i.e. it’s now coming from a US based address in the suburbs instead of some third world country.)
Doesn’t matter that they’re immediately losing like 50% of the gift card “value” because it’s all raw profit anyway.
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