I suppose if you an item on layaway at a store, you could use a gift card for that store to pay off the layaway balance. That’s a sort of debt.
It also depends on if you consider one of those prepaid debit cards to be gift cards. They look like gift cards and are sold in stores where they offer gift cards, but are accepted as payment by any organization who takes a debit card.
Certainly not gov’t. or banks. Fedex does take gift cards as payment. DHL takes some digital wallets.
The bigger red flag is the insistence that payment be made by gift card only, nothing else is acceptable.
Yes, this is a sign that it’s a scam.
Are gift cards redeemable for cash? Or is there some legitimate-looking method of converting them?
Money transfer services such as PayPal or Venmo, card conversion sites.
But again, no legitimate businesses or government agencies ask that a payment must be made in gift cards.
100% correct.
Then why won’t those players (meaning entities involved in the process) simply shut the whole thing down (adopt terms that make cards not be redeemable for cash)?
The cards can’t be officially redeemed for cash, but they can be sold for some percentage on the dollar. I can’t take a $20 Apple gift card to an Apple Store and walk out with cash, but I can put it up for sale for $15 and get cash from someone who’s excited about a 25% discount on their next Apple purchase.
Yikes!
Kitboga did this YouTube video of this scam where a scammer was selling cars online on ligitmate websites, but fraudulently using a car service center’s real name and address as contact information. The scammer made a fake webpage with the real address but then the scammer’s cell phone for contact info.
The scammer sells the cars, then has people go to the service center to pick them up, where the people find out they’ve been scammed.
Unfortunately, a lot of the people who have been scammed then believe that the business owner is somehow connected, and put reviews for the legitimate service center saying that he’s the scammer.
This one got shut down, thanks to Kitboga, but damn, that’s scary.
Dragging legitimage businesses into scams isn’t anything new.
Back when I was backpacking around Asia in the 80s, there was a ruby (?) scam that was common.
Sellers in Nepal(?) would tell people that they could give them a substantial discount on rubies, and if the people didn’t declare them when they returned back home, they could sell the rubies for a nice profit. They would give the name of legitimate jewlery businesses, but those store had nothing to do with the scam.
So the people would buy rubies, smuggle them back to Australia only to find out they were scammed when they went to the store. Apparently some people got pretty pissed at the owners of the store, assuming they were in the scam as well, even though the store owners had nothing to do with it.
With that scam, the people being scammers were also doing something wrong, so it was hard to feel sorry for them.
Heck, I remember the fake coupons that you’d see online all the time that people would take into a business and then get mad when told the coupon is fake. That wasn’t a “scam” so much as a hoax, since the coupons were distributed for free, but it still ends much the same way for the affected businesses.
Like the one Tim Walz took into a grocery store when he was a new teacher (as a prank by his fellow teachers.) It backfired when Tim came out of the store with his free turkey.
Well I’m back, and I’m not happy about it. Another credit card scam, so my card is locked. I’ve never had a problem with this card in nearly 15 years. But some lowlife asshole decided to have a go and charged some items at a car parts place several times. I guess he figured I wouldn’t notice because they were for $50 or less. Luckily, the fraud department spotted it.
But now I have to go back to using my other card which has been compromised many times in the past, which is why I never use it. I didn’t even find out about the problem until I tried to pay for lunch today and it was declined. Luckily, the restaurant owner was understanding and nice and let us go home to get the other card and call in the charge. Downside, of course, is that all of our recurring payments are on that card. Fuck!
Some ShitHook called my phone tonight. Wouldn’t Identify themselves. So I laid a little smooth jazz on them.
That got em!
That’s pretty good. But they have heavy metal bagpipe music, now.
You got a call from a CH-47?
Tony is a 42 year old professional from northern California who started investing in crypto in 2013. One evening, as he was putting his toddlers to bed, he received a message from Google about an account security issue, followed by a telephone call from one Daniel Alexander of Google, who informed him that his account was being accessed by someone in Germany and could he please click “Yes” to a prompt that Google was sending to his phone?
I hope you can see where this is going.
Next Tony receives a phone call from Trezor, a provider of encrypted hardware devices used to store crypto. Apparently his account had been compromised but he could recover it by entering his crypto password at a phishing site. Tony did just that and lost a cool $4.7 million to the ether.
The supposed Google and Trezor reps were part of the same criminal outfit. The most popular attack vector for stealing money passes through your email account. The main defense for such attacks is htt ps://kre bsonse curity.com/2020/ 04/when-in -doubt-han g-up-look-u p-call-back/ .
Yes, it will take a few minutes to get through the voice prompts. Tough. Don’t take telephone calls from financial institutions or your email provider. Or lol Microsoft.
Even urgent ones. Especially urgent ones. I sort of doubt whether email companies need your permission to stop an attack. They would just stop it, then ask for your authorization. If they telephoned you. Which they wouldn’t in all likelihood. After they lock your account, it’s your problem after all.
https ://krebso nse curity.co m/2024/12/how-to-lo se-a-fortun e-with-just-on e-bad- click/
Diving deeper, there are 2 twists to this story. The first is that Google was impersonated - I’m mildly surprised that their system permitted this sort of hack.
The 2nd is that your email can be accessed with a social engineering attack directed at the password recovery process aka the account recovery process. I suspect this is a popular hack. Brian Krebs, from the comments in the above article:
In the example of the two victims mentioned in the story, they gave the phishers access to their Google accounts by clicking yes to the account recovery prompt they were sent. The attackers then used the access to those Google Authenticator codes to compromise third-party accounts tied to the app.
If a criminal has access to your Gmail and your one-time codes, they can effectively access any account tied to that Gmail account, if not directly then through a password reset, which would send a link to the compromised email account.
Scammers are improving.
The second quote above is precisely why I refuse to use Google (or other accounts) as logins. Sure, keeping track of multiple credentials is less convenient — which is why I use a password manager — but making it less convenient for scammers more than compensates.
(And within the password manager, none of the passwords are exactly what I use: each contains a keyword that tells me to use, for example, the last four digits of a phone number I had umpty-ump years ago.)
It’s easy to get taken by a spear phish. My dad and aunt were emailed by one pretending to be their cousin asking for gift cards. They both knew of the common scam but were taken in by seemingly familiarity.