You know how when people get scammed, the scammers ask for these giftcards, I guess so that banks can’t do anything to retrieve the money. But how do they actually get spendable money out of them?
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Gift cards are easy to fence, since they are a liquid asset. Which is something that’s either straight case, or can be easily converted into cash.
You’ll sometimes see offers online where somebody’s selling say a $50 gift card for a fraction of its face value. It entices buyers because they’re essentially getting free money out of the deal. Of course there’s no such thing as free money, but few people in the market for such things are ever going to ask where the card came from.
From there, I’d assume the scammers are using a shell company to launder payments made electronically. That company “buys” the cards to sell, sells them online and runs the transactions, and returns the profits to its shareholders. The shareholders of course being the scammers. The way corporations work, is that owners have limited liability. Which means the authorities cannot seize assets from shareholders to pay off any legal issues the company incurs. Effectively putting up a barrier between the scammer and the online marketplace. The company also has a layer of plausible deniability, since it can always claim it didn’t know the cards were hot. It would be difficult to prove otherwise, if the scammers are good at covering their tracks.
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