Gift cards have become a multibillion-dollar industry, a gift that always fits and stands up to social distancing. Worldwide, consumers spent billions on gift cards last year.
However, that total comes with an asterisk — it includes the gift cards on which scammers increasingly rely to extract payment from their victims. An in-depth investigative study by Better Business Bureau (BBB) finds an increase in reports of scams involving gift cards, with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses over the last few years.
The study — Gift Card Payment Scams: BBB Reveals Why Scammers Love Gift Cards — looks at the scope of fraud involving gift cards as a payment method, the way various cards work, the scammers who exploit them, the efforts to combat the scams, and the steps that the industry can take to further tackle this scourge.
According to the study, payment by gift card is a common thread among many scams that have been the subject of previous BBB studies, including government impersonators, business email compromise frauds, tech support frauds, romance scams, fake check scams, prize/sweepstakes scams, and online sales of nonexistent vehicles.
