BISMARCK, N.D. (KFGO) – With the holiday season upon us, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem is reminding North Dakotans to watch out for gift card scams.
“Only buy gift cards if you are giving them as gifts to family or friends, because gift cards are a favorite tool used by scam artists,” said Stenehjem.
The Federal Trade Commission says many gift card scams start with a phone call from someone impersonating a government agency.
“No government agency ever accepts gift cards to pay a debt,” said Stenehjem.
Scammers may claim that they will freeze your accounts or threaten to arrest you, unless you make an immediate payment. They will even stay on the phone with their victims while they go to the store to purchase specific gift cards or a prepaid card.
Once the victim has purchased the gift cards, the scam artist asks them for the numbers on the back of the cards. Those numbers are all anyone needs to go online from anywhere in the world and transfer the balance of the gift card into their own account.
The Attorney General’s Consumer Protection division reports that in the last two weeks, they have received nine reports from victims of gift card scams, with losses totaling $45,000. Victims, ranging in age from 26 to 75, reportedly fell for different versions of the scam.
“The one thing all these scams had in common is that the victim was told to purchase prepaid cards and gift cards,” said Parrell Grossman, director of the Consumer Protection division. “The government and legitimate companies do not demand that you make payments using gift cards. If that is what you are told, it is guaranteed to be a scam.”
The scams included calls from fake government officials threatening the victim would lose their benefits, phony sweepstakes officials pretending the victim had won a prize but needed to make an upfront payment, fake online job listings, and false account payment error emails supposedly from Amazon and other well-known businesses.
