# Wal Mart/Gift Card Scam **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 29, 2018, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wal-mart-gift-card-scam/826874 "2018-12-29T17:19:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![SanDiegoTim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/85e7bf/32.png) [@SanDiegoTim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SanDiegoTim)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2018, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wal-mart-gift-card-scam/826874/1 "2018-12-29T17:19:43Z")
I’m getting pop ups on both my iPad and iPhone purporting to offer Wal Mart gift cards. I know it’s bogus, but how do I get rid of whatever it is that’s responsible? Lots of conversation about it online, but can’t find a fix for iPad or iPhone. ---
**Author:** ![SamuelA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@SamuelA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SamuelA)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2018, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wal-mart-gift-card-scam/826874/2 "2018-12-29T17:40:24Z")
You need an ad-blocker. It’s extremely unlikely, especially on ios, that your device is actually infected. Rather, the problem is that you are visiting web sites (whether by clicking a link in email or using an embedded browser in certain applications like Discord or using safari or chrome) that have ads, and some of these ads are scam ads claiming you won a prize that play tricks with popups to make it difficult to close the ad. There are several ad blockers available for ios, Apple natively supports this. Adblock Plus has one, but I haven’t done the research to find out if this is the best available or not. I can say that I use a program called “adblock browser” on Android for this purpose, as I was annoyed by these exact same time wasting ads. ---
**Author:** ![JB99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/439d5e/32.png) [@JB99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JB99)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2018, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wal-mart-gift-card-scam/826874/3 "2018-12-29T17:42:10Z")
The ones I’ve encountered are linked to advertising. The website has an embedded ad with a script that creates a pop-up window and redirects the browser to some kind of spam page. The only way I know of to resolve this is to use the Adblock web browser. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2018, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wal-mart-gift-card-scam/826874/4 "2018-12-29T17:46:26Z")
NoScript might be useful, too, but IME it makes using the web generally a misery.