Is the money sitting in an account?
Can’t they reverse it?
Do the scammers buy games, or in game currency to try launder?
How is it so difficult to recover stolen funds when there’s a trail?
In: 3
It’s alarming how scammers exploit these gift cards, but unfortunately, tracing the stolen funds can be challenging due to various loopholes and anonymous transactions.
There are marketplaces, where you can exchange giftcards for Bitcoin…
Let’s say scammer gets $100 giftcard. He will sell it for $50 on darkweb marketplace…
Someone will happily buy 100$ giftcard for $60 (and marketplace keeps $10 fee) … Everyone is happy (except scammed people ofc)
They exchange the gift cards for lower than their value to whatever platform the cards are for, there’s plenty of people that would want to pay, say, £20 for a £30 steam voucher card, from the buyer’s perspective it’s a great deal, they basically just get an extra £10 to spend on games, and the scammer, who got the £30 voucher for free, makes £20 selling it on. So the scammer makes £20, the buyer gets an extra £10, and obviously the person who got scammed just looses £30.
As a side note, this is often why certain online key resellers for steam or other platforms tend to be considered a bit shady. In theory the games on there shouldn’t have been bought fraudulently, but they could be used in the same way as how people sell the cards. Rather than selling the card for £20 to someone, they just buy a £30 game themselves on steam and sell it on one of these sites for £20
They go into fraudulent steam and Google accounts. If you want to play a game for half price or more but it needs to be legit, then you’ll get a random steam account with the game already purchased for that account ( with a stolen cc).
Getting a legit steam key is much harder because they know it’s easy money for criminals and actively prevent it (hence why steam gifts are not a huge thing).
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