Good afternoon everyone, a friend of mine from Irvine (Southern California) sent me the following email about gift card fraud and how the scammers were able to access the gift card information by tampering with the gift card packaging. Here is his story:
A few days ago, I went to Woodbury Ralphs to get a few VGC’s. I should have been tipped off that something was wrong b/c there were barely any left …. there usually are tons.
But anyway, I grabbed a few and checked out. They all still had the pull tab intact. They all loaded with $500 just fine, without a problem.
Upon calling the 1-800 # to activate two of them, however, the prompts said that the cards could not be activated and to speak to a customer service rep. It turned out that both of the cards were frozen b/c someone had tried to access funds on them (back in October 2014). And thus they were frozen.
I looked carefully at the cards and they were pretty scratched up (one of them had a hair glued on!). A closer inspection of the packaging on the bottom showed that there was a very subtle yellow hue at the bottom of the packages where the scammer had sliced them open and glued them back together again. I have attached photos of this (I slightly adjusted the levels of the picture in Photoshop to enhance the yellow at the bottom, so it’s easier to see (it was barely noticeable in real life).
