I’d like to know what I did last week
Got this from the contact page last night:
Now of course there’s no way that Zihadul Islam could have connected me with stuffing the almost lifeless body of what turned out to be a mob boss’s kid into the back of the stolen car I accidentally hit him with. I was wearing a mask because of a previous store robbery. Nor could he have located my temporary lair in a metro cistern where I chain my temporary friends.
TL;DR – Paul rambles on about gift card scams
But the question is, who falls for these things? They’re profitable enough that spamming and working thousands of people is a full time job. It’s gotten so that these and scams where the Sheriff’s Department/IRS/Electric company call and threaten you if you don’t go and buy gift cards is a huge percentage of what police fraud departments are dealing with daily.
So much so that people going to Walgreens and the like will quite often be asked if they’re being threatened by someone on the phone if they try and buy gift cards while chatting on a cell phone. More often though they’re not even questioned if they buy thousands of dollars of gift cards. Huh.
Seems a bit off doesn’t it? I’m talking gift cards here right now, not the scammers. They’ve found what works. Why is the gift card industry still a thing? I’ve never in my life thought that saying I loved someone exactly $25 but not perhaps $30 and limiting the choice in how they spent the money was a particularly good gift.
“Oh no sonny, I love you $27.51 this year, but they didn’t have that amount available so I rounded down because your sass-mouth wasn’t worth $30.”
Of course when the scammers get $10,000 worth of Red Lobster gift cards you’d think the police could then jump in at someone who’s been at the RL a little too much this week… I mean seriously, I hear the biscuits are to die for but there’s a time to step away from the table Rick.
These gift cards are then sold to groups who hit up gift card into cash kiosks across the country and tadaa… the police might manage to get one person, who bought it from someone, who traded it to someone.
They’re not going to get the top dogs in an organization because the person who got caught was in possession of some amount that’s less than the legal limit to do anything major. The person they caught was probably some kid or homeless person being asked to do an exchange.
And the beat goes on. Your local Walgreens, Walmart, Target, make a commission off of every card they activate, and realistically some profit on every card redeemed there. There are no checks for who’s redeeming these cards or who’s purchasing them.
And until there are, these scams will keep on being incredibly profitable. Until Target, Walgreens, etc require talking to a person about scams for gift card purchases of more than $500 or so, these will keep going on.
