[ggggtez]

To be fair about (3), I think they already do that. They mention in the article that the cards are redeemed by people in your country.

Unfortunately, the gift card is an item that is intended to be easy to give to other people, just like cash. This doesn't seem like an easy problem to solve.

I think (4) has the most chance of success. Even just adding a 4 hour "activation time" on cards worth more than $250 would make the scam just a little harder to pull off, and real consumers would rarely be inconvenienced. The guy in this story would have realized he was scammed and had ~4 hours after the call to try to fix the situation.

[gav]

If you had to show id when redeeming gift cards over a certain amount, merchants could use this to track down "runners". Though I imagine that a lot of them are probably recruited in a similar way to the work from home scams.

The real problem is that merchants are not incentivized to fix the problem as they make money from it.

[jpkoning]

>Even just adding a 4 hour "activation time" on cards worth more than $250 would make the scam just a little harder to pull off

That's a good idea.

Implicit in this idea is that victims can call a customer help number and get gift card balances frozen and reversed. I don't know if this is possible to do right now.

If so, fraudsters might start up a new scam. Buy $1000 in Target gift cards, spend the money at Target, call up Target and claim that a scammer stole the funds, and then get $1000 back, netting $2000.

Target would have to build a new department just to adjudicate gift card claims. At which point it might decide that it's just not worth the hassle of issuing gift cards.

[sjburt]

Scammers want cash, they don't want $1000 of Target merchandise that they have to figure out how to sell. Gift cards aren't quite cash, but they're easier to sell.

[mustardo]

I used to work on a platform that ran on the POS and issued various gift cards via the receipt printer (think prepay mobiles) or actived physical gift cards like these. For products we could there was a cooling down time of a few hours between purchase and redemption. This also made it harder for the sales clerk to scam