A long time ago, in one of my more popular posts (if you’re new to the site, I suggest you go read it just because I think it’s pretty entertaining,) I wrote about how I flew down to Los Angeles to make a Smart and Final gift card run. I had amassed something like $1,000 of Arco gas gift cards just because I figured a) I always need gas and b) these can’t be easily scammed because you’d need the physical gift card to use them…
Fast forward 3 years and I still have a few hundred Arco gift cards remaining (that’s because of a lot of grocery store gas promos and we had a Nissan Leaf for a year in between there.) My wife went to use a $50 gift card the other week and it showed up as only a $25 balance. She thought that was odd because she would never fill up $25 exactly on a $50 gift card. Then a week later, she tried another $50 card and it had a $0 balance. We called up Arco customer service, who was of no use whatsoever. The rep could only say, “Yes it was used at location 12345.” Well, where is location 12345? She had no idea. FACEPALM!
I’m guessing the scammers know the algorithm of the Arco gift cards and just test them all until some work. They assume they all have a $25 balance and hence only $25 of the $50 was used.
Lessons Learned
I wrote once before – don’t stock up on gift cards from 3rd parties. Now, my stance is – don’t stock up on gift cards that don’t have PINs (aka Applebee’s.) I’m sure eventually those will somehow get hacked too (ala SVM hack or I think it was them.) Just don’t stock up on gift cards at all. The savings from buying a gift card at a 10% discount NOW vs a 5% discount ‘when you need it’ will easily get wiped out if you get scammed.
Threw a $200 MGC in a drawer for about 2 months a while back now and found it had $11 on it when I went to use it. Ended up eventually getting a $225 check after a CFPB complaint when they “forgot” to mail my replacement card. Like 5 months in total. The strange part, though, was that the card was used to pay utility bills in 2 different states. There’s more layers to scammers getting paid than just using the cards. Haven’t had any other issues yet, surprisingly.
I try to never sit on a gift card for more than a few weeks. The one I did sit on for a few months got drained and it took me like 5 phone calls to get it refunded. Just not worth the risk/hassle