Fake Gift Card Balance Checking Sites May Steal Your Money. Scammers have a new way of ripping people off this year. If you’re not mindful of it, it could cost you. Gift cards have always been relatively popular, but they seem to be more popular this year than ever. According to the online fraud prevention company Bolster, thieves have been hard at work setting up bogus ‘gift card balance’ checking websites designed to siphon money away from unsuspecting consumers.
Here’s’ how it works:
You get a gift card for Christmas and put it in a drawer for a few weeks or even months. Eventually, you find it, but by now, you can’t remember if you spent some of the money that was on the card. So you’re not at all sure how much money is left. You go online and do some searching, which brings up a link to a site promising to give you your gift card balance in just a few clicks. However, it’s will give you Fake Gift Card balance.
You surf to the page and enter your card number instead of giving you your balance information. (usually, you’ll get a timeout message, but some are more sophisticated than that), it will send the gift card number to a command and control server so the hackers can steal it. They use it to order goodies for themselves, to keep for themselves, or resell.
It’s low, but it’s an easy scam to pull off, and even relatively unsophisticated criminals can manage it, so expect to see lots of bogus balance checking sites this year.
While Target seems to be the retailer that the scammers are most focused on this year, Bolster has spotted several other fake balance checking sites targeting companies like:
- Bath and Body Works
- Forever 21
- Amazon
- The Google Play Store
- And HBO
Just be aware that the scam exists, and be mindful of where you go on the web when you check your gift card balances.
