BrianKrebsDec 18, 2023

Hey everyone! I'm guessing a lot of you will be buying last minute gifts for people, and those tend to involve gift cards. Be very careful when you're buying these off-the-rack at retail stores that sell gift cards for various popular restaurants and brands. Especially those that are not in particularly tamper-proof packaging.

A friend just shared some photos he took after buying a bunch of Dardens restaurant gift cards for some gifts to clients. They didn't discover until leaving the store that several of the cards had been tampered with, their PIN scratch-offs re-covered with look-alike scratch off stickers. Also, the phony ones seem to have goofy looking barcodes, like they were scanned and printed by a laser printer without enough ink.

The trick here is the thieves pull the card out, scratch off the PIN part, record that, cover up the pin with fake tape, and then shove the thing back in the packaging and put it back on the shelf. Then, when someone buys it, the thieves can access the value on the card the minute it is activated (purchased).

The image shows two of these cards that are non-tampered (left) and two on the right that were. These cards can slide right out of their packaging with a little wiggling, and slide back in the same way.

Some stores keep their gift cards behind the counter for this reason. Might be best going for those instead of the ones in aisle 19.

Show threadgrahamsz

@briankrebs Why would the barcodes be different or "goofy looking" on the tampered ones? As i understand this scam there'd be no need to replace the barcode.

Also shouldn't the issuer reasonably be able to detect this? Surely if a card is checked for validity before it's been sold then they should prevent it from being activated in the first place?

Surely these scammers must have to regularly check all the tampered cards, and odds are that'll happen before they are sold.

Dec 18, 2023 at 10:32pmWeb
Show threadMike JšŸ‘¹šŸ€ šŸ¤˜šŸ»Dec 18, 2023
@grahamsz @briankrebs Why would the store make it their problem when they can make it yours?
Show threadBrianKrebsDec 18, 2023
@grahamsz IDK. It could be that they are also placing some new type of plastic covering on top that interferes with the bar code looking correct. I'm not 100 percent sure. But look at the images.
Show threadgrahamszDec 18, 2023

@briankrebs I see what you are seeing, but my instinct is that it's just a bad ribbon in whatever thermal transfer printer produced the cards. Surely the barcode would need to be correct and original to allow the card to be activated when some sucker buys it?

Having said that, I enjoy figuring out how these scams work and it's interesting if they've figured out how to do something with the barcodes