FTC Warns Consumers About Paying Scammers With Gift Cards
Changing my IP address has become a standard procedure for me, every time I go online. For example, I was personally contacted 4 years ago by a "law office" claiming that there was a warrant issued for me in their state, and they wanted to confirm my social security number, address, and full name by phone to make sure I wasn't the person being prosecuted.
Lisa owns two Rottweilers that both eat a good chunk of their weight each month in dog food, so Lisa said she felt like she'd really hit on a bargain when she found a $165 Petco gift card for sale at a popular online gift card retailer for $120 (a nearly 30 percent discount on the value).
Then of course there is "online credit card fraud" which is the most common type of credit card fraud today with all the transactions that people do each day. Friends, family, or accomplices bring the pre-paid credit cards to the crooked cashiers at registers, where they load them up with hundreds of dollars.
The bank details allowed the scammer to raid your account rather than put money in. That's because gift card fraud is becoming more and more common among financial scammers, according to security experts. Scammers insert fake messages into genuine threads of messages between a customer and their bank.
Use gift cards scammer vs scammer as soon as possible. If stealing people's identity wasn't working for scam artists, then it would have faded away like other social fads. The customer was tricked into creating a one-time password, which is normal procedure in mobile phone banking, and then passing this to the scammers, who used the password to empty his bank account.
The consumer received a voicemail saying that she owed the IRS and that, if she didn't pay, her bank accounts and Social Security would be frozen. For example, you will never be asked to pay your utility bills, bail money, debt collection and hospital bills with Target GiftCards.
This process will continue until the scammer can no longer convince the victim to send any more money. Screenshot of a Recent Changes page from a MediaWiki site affected by customer support scammers promoting their "help lines" through unethical means such as spamming.