Originally Posted by
savingwizard
Experienced gift card fraud at my local Safeway (north CA) again.
It happened to me a while back before. It activated fine, but when I tried to use it in store, the card never worked. Then I remembered the glue in the package is very strong and you can never cleanly remove the glue from the card. a few days later all the money were gone.
Today I experienced the similar strong glue when I opened the just purchased 3 gift cards. Concerned about the fraud, I tried to use them asap in store, none of them worked! To avoid the hassle to request the replacement cards, I used all of them online.
In curiosity, I went back to Safeway and opened another gift card package with the same picture. It also has the strong glue! You can not tell the difference between the good card and bad card from the outside of the package. I can't imagine the fraud is done from a person without any connection from the gift card manufacturer. It has to be an insider.
Not sure how widespread the issue is, but from now on I'd always check the glue before purchase the gift card.
How did the sides of the VGC packaging look? Obviously the user had to gain access to the VGC card and usually they create a slit somewhere one of the sides of the packaging and later glue it with strong glue. I was a victim of one of these fraud cards at a WM VGC in SoCal but after analyzing the VGC packaging it should have been obvious that the VGC packaging was tampered.