Data security experts say one way to thwart credit card hackers, or at least minimize the damage, is to know the signs that your card has been hacked in the first place. That knowledge not only allows you to alert your credit card company and law enforcement, it also teaches you a long-term lesson in how card data thieves operate, enabling you. Gary December 19, 2017. The Peet’s coffee cards are scratchers. In addition, you can use their app to pay with a QR code. When you use the app, the redemption code is immediately verified.
Prepaid gift cards from brands like American Express and Visa make a lot of sense in theory. Like gift cards, they release you from the psychological horror of handing your loved ones cold, hard cash, but you can use them anywhere you can use credit cards, so they offer the receiver more flexibility than a store gift card. Great!
Visa Gift Card
However, if you’ve ever received one, you may have discovered that they don't work like store gift cards in one major, critical way: if you swipe, say, a $25 Macy's gift card when making a $50 Macy's purchase, it'll take the $25 off your purchase and then you can pay the remaining balance with cash or your debit card. But if you try to use a $25 Visa gift card on a $50 Macy’s purchase, the card will get declined — because you’re essentially asking it to go over its limit. The only way to keep this from happening is to tell the person ringing you up, “I want to put $25 on this card” before you swipe the Visa gift card, so they can split the tender accordingly. This isn’t ideal, but it’s fine for a nice, solid number like $25.
But! It becomes a much bigger hassle when your $100 Visa gift card now has, say, $14.77 on it. It’s highly likely that at some point, there’s going to be such a weird/small amount left on the card that you’re going to be too embarrassed to ask a retail worker to “just put $4.36 on this card,” so instead you’re just going to deprive yourself of the full value of the gift card. I’m not saying this is what Big Credit Card wants to happen, but I do think these little amounts of cash left on thousands of gift cards add up for them in a way that they…do not hate. The whole thing has annoyed me for years, ever since I was on the other end of the transaction when I worked in retail in college.
(Also: to even be able to do what I outlined above, you have to keep track of the exact balance on the gift card, which requires going to a website and inputting the card number and PIN every time you want to check how much is left on it.)
All this to say: Visa and American Express and Mastercard prepaid gift cards are way more high-maintenance than they should be, and even though this is a minor hassle in the grand scheme of things, it’s still a hassle at the end of the day. But! After receiving a high-value prepaid Visa gift card last year and getting sick of checking the balance all the time, I figured out a really simple and easy workaround that allows you to actually use every penny on said card: Once the gift card is down to a stupidly small amount that you don’t feel like fucking with, you can just go to Amazon and buy yourself an e-gift card for the exact amount on the Visa gift card. So if there’s $7.83 on the Visa card, you can simply buy yourself a $7.83 Amazon gift card.
Once you’ve put in the exact amount and your personal details (including your own email address), add the gift card to your cart. Then head to check out, choose “add new payment method,” and put in the details of the prepaid gift card there (just like it’s a regular credit/debit card). You now have now successfully turned your prepaid gift card into a normal store gift card, and it’ll work as such — deducting that $7.83 from your next Amazon purchase, and letting you pay the remaining amount due, just as God intended. 🛍
🍑
Prepaid gift cards make popular presents and no-brainer stocking stuffers, but before you purchase one be on the lookout for signs that someone may have tampered with it. A perennial scam that picks up around the holidays involves thieves who pull back and then replace the decals that obscure the card’s redemption code, allowing them to redeem or transfer the card’s balance online after the card is purchased by an unwitting customer.
Last week KrebsOnSecurity heard from Colorado reader Flint Gatrell, who reached out after finding that a bunch of Sam’s Club gift cards he pulled off the display rack at Wal-Mart showed signs of compromise. The redemption code was obscured by a watermarked sticker that is supposed to make it obvious if it has been tampered with, and many of the cards he looked at clearly had stickers that had been peeled back and then replaced.
“I just identified five fraudulent gift cards on display at my local Wal-Mart,” Gatrell said. “They each had their stickers covering their codes peeled back and replaced. I can only guess that the thieves call the service number to monitor the balances, and try to consume them before the victims can. I’m just glad I thought to check!”
The top two gift cards show signs that someone previously peeled back the protective sticker covering the redemption code. Image: Flint Gatrell.
Kevin Morrison, a senior analyst on the retail banking and payments team at market analysis firm Aite Group, said the gift card scheme is not new but that it does tend to increase in frequency around the holidays, when demand for the cards is far higher.
“Store employees are instructed to look for abnormalities at the [register] but this happens [more] around the holiday season as attention spans tend to shorten,” he said. “While giftcard packaging has improved and some safe-guards put in place, fraudsters look for the weakest link and hit hard when they find one.”
Gift cards make great last-minute gifts, but don’t let your guard down in your haste to wrap up your holiday shopping. There are so many variations on the above-described scheme that many stores have taken to keeping gift cards at or behind the register, where cashiers can more easily spot customers trying to tamper with the cards. As a result, stores that take this basic precaution may be the safest place to purchase gift cards.
Update, Dec. 20, 7:30 a.m. ET: Mr. Gatrell just shared a link to this story, which incredibly is about another man who was found to have bought tampered gift cards in the very same Wal-Mart where Gatrell found the above-pictured cards.
Vanilla Visa Gift Card Hacked Account
That story includes some other security tips when buying and/or giving gift cards:
Vanilla Visa Gift Card Hacked
When purchasing a gift card, pull from the middle of the pack because those are less likely to be tampered with. Also, get a receipt when buying the card so you have proof of the purchase. Include that receipt if you give the card as a gift. Finally, activate the card quickly and use it quickly and keep a close eye on the balance.