Last month, I wrote about how scammers were tampering with Amazon gift cards at a Safeway in Seattle. Well, today a reader in the Bay Area told me she bought a tampered Home Depot gift card at Safeway. Here’s what she wrote:
It’s a photo copy of a real GC. If you just glance at it, it looks real and it scans! Package was sealed with double sided tape and there’s no scratch off! Just a good color copy.
Just seeing this now in the photo – you can see a faint $25 outline – so it does look like they glued a piece of paper on top of a real low denom card.. As you can see, the bar code was activated. So I’m guessing they are taking various HD gc, scanning them and making copies and gluing them onto real cards…which is why the print looks blurry too.
the package was sealed with double sided tape – which i found suspicious when tearing card out and then finding a fake card. but if you compare to the picture with the card sealed, it’s hard to see all this at a glance, especially with the top part of the card covered. main difference is that a real card has that embossed and shiny barcode, while a piece of paper is flat and not shiny
they were also on the front of the rack, a couple of 100 denoms, 200 denoms, variable denoms were taken off by me and the supervisor
Luckily she found this out and went back to the store to take care of it. The lesson learned here is to be vigilant people – like I said in my Amazon post, it wouldn’t hurt to open the package while you’re still in the store.