Comment on A rare steam gift cards are still in the wild
black0ut@pawb.social 1 week agoWhich was bs excuse cuz digital gift cards still exist. Clearly, manufacturing the card and letting the store make a small profit when selling it was too expensive. But yeah, steam gift cards are no longer manufactured and missing from any store near me.
Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I think they got rid of digital gift cards as well, except through steam, where it has to be gifted to another account.
My understanding is that there were 3 mains scams that abused gift cards (steam and otherwise)
A scammer would coerce a victim to buy gift cards and give the info to them. This usually targeted the elderly, and the scammer would often impersonate the IRS/police/etc, claiming they (or their family members) were in legal trouble/facing arrest, and offer to make it go away if they bought the gift cards. Since it usually targeted people who aren’t tech-savvy, they would usually buy these gift cards locally. Banks won’t refund this one because the victim made the purchase themselves.
Tampering with cards in a store. People would record pin numbers off cards in the store, put a new scratch sticker over them, and then use bots to try to constantly redeem the card. As soon as someone buys it, the bot redeems the gift card immediately before the buyer can get home and redeem it themselves. Another version of this involves stealing unactivated cards, and swapping their barcode/packaging with cards still in the store. When someone buys it, it activates the stolen card instead of the physical card the buyer has.
Using stolen credit card details to buy a bunch of gift cards from online retailers. They then immediately try to resell these gift cards for less than the card is worth (ie selling a $50 steam gift card for $30-40). The catch here is that they have a limited amount of time to sell the cards before the original credit card gets reported stolen, and the cards get cancelled. The users who buy and redeem these stolen gift cards can get their accounts automatically banned, which is another layer of support headaches for Steam to deal with (if they buyers were innocent and didn’t realize the cards were stolen).
The 3rd scam can use digital gift cards, but the other two are usually physical only scams, so getting rid of physical gift cards at retailers will eliminate most of them. The 3rd is much less effective and much easier to trace/undo if the digital gift cards have to be purchased through steam and sent directly to users there.