Scammers are placing counterfeit gift cards on store shelves at Publix, CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart. When you scan the barcode at checkout, it steals your full credit card data instead of loading the card's value. You only find out it's fake when you try to use it later, and most people don't have the receipt to get refunded.
Chapters
It was happening like in 2022 a little bit. He said it started ramping up around the end of 2022.
That's when I started hearing about it.
For the holidays, it really, really ramped up. And then he said it got about a month or two ago, he said it got completely out of control.
So what are they doing?
So what are they doing? People are making fake gift card, the packaging, right? And then this barcode on the back. I learned what this does and that freaked me out. So what happens is when you go to the, like, you know, where do you buy these? Publix, CVS, Walgreens, Walgreens, Walmart, right? So what happens is you go in and you see it looks like the Amazon gift card, the Visa gift card. And all that. So you go and you take it, you go up to the counter, and then they peel off this piece that exposes the barcode in the back. In the back, they scan the barcode. When they scan the barcode, they say to you to run your card. So now you're putting your chip card into the thing and you tell them how much you want to put, and they can go, oh yeah, this one says 25. Or let's say—
I forget that they're like that now.
Yeah, most of them have a have a dollar amount that says $25. And for— I, I don't know why, but this barcode tells them where to send the information, your credit card information. So now this is a scam card. The scammer has my— now has all my credit card information, full credit card data. Yep, not just the last 4 digits, they got the whole thing.
So they have your name.
Yeah, and your name. They have your credit card data, right? Because they have everything that's on the front and back of your card. Now they have it. You have this gift card. So now I take the gift card, I give it to Justin. Justin takes the gift card, and maybe, you know, I don't give Justin the gift card receipt, or I don't have the regular receipt, right? Or whatever, I don't give him— or he throws away the gift card receipt and he goes on Amazon He goes to use the card and they go, no, we need— no, it's no good. It's not a good card because it's counterfeit. Yep. So they started keeping these behind the counter. Also, they don't give people their money back unless they have a copy of the receipt that they bought it with or the gift card receipt.
Well, that's tragic.
Yeah, it's a gift card. Yeah, but they don't know how they get it.
Most people don't get it. Well, they can't.
Yeah, you get it, you get it.
I'm saying the people who's getting the gift—
I give people the gift card receipt. They give you one. Allen Kopelman. Okay, well, when I—
definitely an exception. I'm not giving— like, if I give a gift card, I guess if it's for my kids, I'll give it to like my daughter, right?
Like, my—
I'm like, okay, this is the gift card, this is for you, Ellie, here's the receipt, here's for you, Mom, right? Yeah, I guess I would consciously try.
Or let's say I'm giving it away in a giveaway, you know, I put that receipt in there. The gift receipt, it doesn't—
I mean, you've been in this payment processing game for, you know, 22 dinosaurs walking around. No, I'm joking.
No. So the— so now I've heard like people saying, oh, my credit card data got stolen, my credit card data got stolen. And I was talking to one of my friends this morning after I found out about this. I said, you know, recently you told me your credit card got used at blah, blah, blah. I said, did you buy any gift cards recently? And he goes, yeah. He goes, yeah. And I had a problem. I bought a $500 gift card. Gift card at the grocery store to give my daughter who was going to college. And then she went to college and they said it was no good. And then thank goodness I had the receipt, blah, blah, blah.
Which grocery store did you buy?
In Publix.
Okay, I'm going to tell you a little bit of something that's happening with my dad. I told him, I said, I think something's wrong with the way that you— I think there's something up with the security system at Publix.
I don't think it's the security system. It's these cards.
That's what it is. Because he always goes— after he goes and uses his card at Publix, he's always got some sort of random charges on his card the next day.
That's weird. I would report that to the credit card company.
He is. He has been working on it every time. It's hilarious to me, man.
He—
somebody could have— tech is like water and milk. Milk and— what is it? Milk and oil. I mean, I find it hard to—
but that's crazy because This barcode, you would think, goes back. So the two largest gift card companies are Incomm and Blackhawk. They're the ones who supply most of these gift cards you see in the stores. Okay. And, um, but the ones being targeted the most are the Visa Vanilla card and the Visa cards and the Starbucks cards. Not so much anything else. But the guy says what's going on is the scammer comes into the store goes over to the rack and just puts a couple around and they don't know whether that's a customer or not. And the next unsuspecting customer goes and grabs that, makes a purchase.
Yeah, it was before— not only when Allen brought this up, I was telling him that I had heard about it because I watched. There was literally the guy— I forget, this was a long time ago. This is at least a year ago, right? How the guy would walk into these stores basically like the delivery guy. He would have his whole box.
Yeah, but they—
I understand what you're saying, sir. This is a year ago, like a year ago, uh, when I was watching this, they would deliver, like he came into the store, delivered it, and put it on the shelf like he worked for the company, right? And so it was non-suspecting, and the store would have no clue that this guy was in there. The one person even came up to him, said, hey, what are you doing? He's like, well, we got to take all these old ones off and put the new ones up, and they just let him go.
Wow, that's great. So I mean, so I was asking the guy at Publix, like, what have they done besides that to secure the gift card? He says, oh, now the gift cards get delivered to them. Well, that's at Publix, and they stock them. No, they used to not do that. No, I'm saying that's at Publix. They're stocking it, so there's no reason.
