Originally Posted by gregorygrady

I've been having a LOT of trouble the past few days buying MOs at Krogers. I attributed it to the rampant fraud going on here in PHX with the USB VGCs. There seems to be a fraud ring that has gone around to many (most?) of the local Frys and stripped all the regular VGCs from the shelves and replaced them with just a couple/few random VGCs (mostly the "balloons" and the "donuts" VGC versions), which look completely normal (including the packaging and stickies inside the packaging, so I'm assuming this is some type of inside job, or else this fraud ring just has access to the CC #s somehow). So MSers like myself are buying these, loading them with $500, and they work but then are drained by the fraudsters quickly. USBank is doing itself no favors by making it hard to use these VGCs. In fact since I had troubles with certain VGCs, I just set those aside to "season", figuring they might work again a few days later. But nope, the fraudsters got to them, draining 6 x $500 = $3k at various Ralph's and Targets in Southern California (Irvine was a common place the frausters drained mine). This is surely costing US Bank a fortune as they are gonna hafta eat the $3k that was drained from my cards, not to mention however much was drained from other ppl's cards. And as I go around PHX area Fry's, I see this at multiple Fry's locations around the city, and just know the poor schmuck that ends up buying these is going to run into a gigantic headache. A few times when it's completely obvious (to me), I will pull the VGCs and throw them away, but other times I'm not certain so I just leave them on the shelf.

Anyways, sorry for the novel, but yes I've also been having lots of issues buying MOs at Kroger/Frys. And SS and Everywheres have not worked well at Frys here in PHX in quite some time (nearly a year?), I'm always surprised when I read that other's are able to liquidate those cards at Krogers. FWIW, my last successful MO purchase at Frys was 2 days ago (9/3 AM) and was with some USB VGCs that I bought very soon prior to my MO purchase...........and that I believe were NOT compromised since they were in a large stack with barcodes in numerical order.