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
The way they get them at first is steal them before activation, record the card number and key, then apply a replacement cover for the key, take those cards to the store and place them on the rack. Monitoring of those numbers via the check balance pages begins.
The customer buys the card and activates it, eventually (unless the customer spends it first) the other party will see the money is present, then go to buy other gift cards from safe sources. Those cards are then listed on various places for sale.
Whenever you see a third party selling gift cards at a discount it’s usually one of a few things. 1) A thief like noted earlier, 2) Grey markets, but this is more for software and games than currency cards, 3) Someone trying to make a store discount work at scale, similar to Target giving a discount if you buy using your target card.
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