It never seems you’ll be the one to fall for the cheap tricks of scammers, especially ones involving payment by gift cards. Until you actually get scammed. We must understand that there are thousands of scams happening every day. It’s a numbers game for the scammers.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, fraud losses top 10 billion dollars each year. Fraudsters make more money than some legitimate industries. They have fine-tuned some clever https://anationofmoms.com/
ways to separate you from your money. The best strategy is to learn how to spot them.
Why Gift Cards Are Used by Scammers?

Gift cards are a preferred payment method for scammers and are becoming more and more popular each year. Gift cards can be virtual or physical to represent a pre-paid amount that is topped up in a card and can be exchanged for goods and services.

Open-looped gift cards can be filled up multiple times and used at different stores. They are usually distributed by banks and other financial institutions. These are not the cards scammers often use.

Closed-looped gift cards are the favorite payment method of online fraudsters. They have a pre-determined amount that the victim pays, and then the scammer can spend it in specific shops. There are hundreds of gift cards available, such as those from Amazon, Google Play, Xbox stores, Walmart, etc.

Scammers use gift cards because it’s difficult to trace them. Bank transfers and most other payment means can be traced by governments to determine who the final beneficiary is. Gift cards do not follow such strict processes.

That’s why they are also irreversible. Once you give away a gift card to someone, the money is gone for good. Even if the store has some information about the user of a gift card, scammers often use fake profiles with different aliases to make purchases. Gift card sums are usually too small for anyone to bother.