My SYW/Thank You MC had one of its 10% back on retail stores promotions, so I bought a $200 prepaid Visa gift card at Staples when Staples had one of its promotions waiving the activation fee. To register the gift card so that I could use it online, I took a photo of the card. I then opened the photo with Mac Preview. On the card, it says "Cardholder services & balance inquiries: www.giftcardmall.com/mygift "
Mac Preview makes the link clickable (see photo here: https://imgur.com/a/0UEy0jp ), so I clicked on it, and I filled in the card number, CVV, and expiration date on the website, at which point it claimed I had a balance of only $3. I panicked and then realized Mac Preview had converted the link from www.giftcardmall.com/mygift to www.giftcardmail.com/mygift. I am certain giftcardmail.com is a scam site set up to harvest card numbers based on errors like this. I moved quickly and used most of the card to pay my estimated taxes for my state so I did not lose $200. The convenience fee charged ended up being less than stated, so I still have a balance of less than $1 on the card. any ideas how to liquidate it online?
So how does this scam work? How would they have stolen the $200 on my card had I not moved at light speed to register the card at giftcardmall.com and pay my estimated taxes?
I filed a complaint with ic3.gov about giftcardmail.com. Any other suggestions where I should file a complaint so giftcardmail.com can't victimize any consumers?
my computer's OCR converted giftcardmall.com to giftcardmail.com, and I accidentally input my Visa GC info onto scam site giftcardmail.com; filed complaint with ic3.gov
byu/beethoven_girl inCreditCards
Posted by beethoven_girl
3 Comments
scrape gc details, then make the user panic with the low balance and call their fake fraud department to get the receipt etc from the user and maybe even some more payment details and personal info depending on how gullible the caller it.
> So how does this scam work? How would they have stolen the $200 on my card had not moved at light speed to register the card at giftcardmall.com and pay my estimated taxes?
They would spend the money on something that can easily be resold for cash with few/no questions asked: gift cards, electronics, etc
giftcardmail.com redirects to cancheckgifted.com or realcoolgifter.com. They seem to have standard CVV checksum validation, then just display some random low balance. Look at the URL of the balance page, and you can just change the number to get some other “balance”: [https://cancheckgifted.com/success.php?card=1234567](https://cancheckgifted.com/success.php?card=1234567) [https://realcoolgifter.com/success.php?card=1234567](https://realcoolgifter.com/success.php?card=1234567)
That page, after several seconds, redirects to giftcards.com, which has some… less than stellar reviews.