Gift card scams are full of tricks and you need to keep your head on straight so that you are not easily scammed when faced with a scammer's tricks. Gift card scams are different from money scams in that money can be used directly, whereas the balance on a gift card cannot be used directly and needs to be topped up to the account to be used on specific products or applications.
So what are some of the situations in which gift cards are scammed? Here are a few situations you may encounter.
1. Someone may ask you to put money on a shopping card, such as a Google Play card or iTunes card, and then give them the number on the back of the shopping card. So it seems, surely no one would be stupid enough to do this, but if the person gives you a very good reason to believe it. For example, if the caller is a business or government agency, and they say you need to pay some fees and use the gift card to pay for them, they are actually trying to scam you. Because no real business or government agency will ever need to ask you to pay with a gift card.
2. Some hackers will use some techniques to run the store's online gift card balance checking system, and when it looks for matching valid gift card numbers that have been activated, the hacker will take those gift cards and sell them. The way you can avoid this then is to load the gift card balance into the gift card app's account, then the gift card will have no balance left.
3. There are also some people who will try to tamper with the physical card. Some thieves will carefully open the gift card package to check the number and then redeem the gift card to their electronic account, and they try to restore the opened package to the way it was before it was opened. So, when you buy a gift card please check the package or PIN label carefully in case you buy an empty gift card, and if you find such problems, you can take it to the cashier to fix it.
Of course, there are many more gift card scam tactics, but as long as you are not gullible and load the gift card to your account in time after you get it, then the money is already in your account and there is no way for other people to scam them from you.