I’ve read horror stories of people buying gift cards that had been tampered with, and surprisingly, it has never happened to me before…well until today. I went to Safeway in a pretty well off suburb of Seattle. Went up to the gift card rack; tried to remember which Amazon gift cards had the easy peel off stickers. Then picked out 4 Amazon gift cards and went up to pay. After I paid, the cashier said there was some kind of issue on the screen. Sure enough, only 2 of the 4 were activated. He then called the manager, who apparently has dealt with this before because he then grabbed 2 more off the shelf and returned the 2 bad ones and rang up the 2 new ones. Then I shit you not, only 1 of the 2 activated. So he runs to grab another one and that one finally activated. Luckily he handed me the receipts for all the gift cards.
When I got home 2 hours later, I opened up the first package and sure enough, I thought it was odd that the pin was already exposed (instead of having the silver strip over it. Luckily I was able to redeem that card. I opened up 2 more cards and same thing! The pins were exposed, but luckily I was able to use them just fine. Then on the last one, I looked at the outside packaging carefully and realized it looked tamper-proof and that no one could have been able to open the packaging and put a used one back in (that’s how good these scammers are.) I went ahead and opened the 4th gift card, and I was relieved that the strip was still on. However, it still didn’t look pristine; there was some smudging above the pin strip. I took off the strip, tried to redeem the code and sure enough, I got the dreaded “Already redeemed to another account.”
I then hopped on to Amazon chat and the overseas rep was clueless, asking me to check with the person who sent it to me or if anyone else in my household who could have redeemed it. FACEPALM! The rep eventually said he’d email the security and gift card team and they’ll get back to me. Stay tuned. In the meantime, you can see the tampered gift cards below. The one on the right you could see was definitely tampered with by the smudges to the right of the strip, but I was able to redeem it in time. The one on the left is that one that I had to contact Amazon. Although it looks newer, if you zoom in on the left side of the strip and above it, it looks pretty dirty too.
Lesson Learned today – always try to buy the newest designs (means prob less time hanging on the shelf to be tampered with.) Another strategy may be to have the cashier open up the packaging all the way before they scan it. If the cards doesn’t have a strip on them, go get new cards. If they look clean, then buy it. If the cashier is hesitant to do that, maybe take it up to the CSR desk and have a manager or someone else do it. Doing this will save you the headache I’m going through.
Okay