Had a similar issue, except no numbers were scratched but the magnetic strip wasn't working. Thankfully, had a CSR who was able to quickly send me a new card next week.

My original post was from the holiday season. If you look around the forums, there ended up being a ton of fraud. A whole GC tampering ring was busted shortly after my post. Now, InComm and Visa are both being sued of the losses to consumers (the suit claims packaging not secure enough). Even today, there are still a ton of DPs coming in about problems using InComms because they've added extra fraud protection.

Haven't bought VGC from CVS in years, is it still $2k per rolling 24hrs and scan of DL required?

Yes

Be careful! I found three fraudulent gift cards at CVS this afternoon. We opened them at the counter and verified that they were actually tampered with.

two of the cards were the old style with the full barcode window, but the third card had the window where half of the barcode was printed on the envelope, and the other half on the card.

someone might have put a walmart SS card into CVS?

I did find one of those a month or so ago, as the $4.94 fee jumped out at me, as CVS charged $5.95. It too was a tampered card. Quite honestly, I don't even know if the CVS register would have activated the card.

This afternoon I found two additional cards that were tampered with at CVS. One almost got by my radar, as all of the card numbers and CVC codes were intact. However, the magnetic strip was scratched and a hot glue dab was on the back versus the gummy adhesive. It's a matter of time before one gets past me.

Data point to add:

Been getting clawbacks from Amex on recent $49X.00 Visa gift card purchases at CVS while trying to hit retention bonus spend.

It's been a year or two since I've done this, but have they swapped over to L3 reporting? Used to stick to CVS strictly because their L2 reporting meant they were a viable candidate for MS, but looks like that might be out the window now.

No L3 data from CVS, you can check yourself (see link below about how to find it). they have been doing clawbacks on cards for people who somehow made their list, and they will continue if you keep doing it. You can try to buy values away from multiples of $505.95 (buy two cards for example, one for $500 the other for $300) but they may claw that back too (who spends $800 at CVS organically - not too many of us). A pause in the spend might make them stop looking, or might not.

https://www.doctorofcredit.com/amex-...ut-of-the-box/

Bought a bad VGC from CVS a few days ago. When I opened it the number had been scratched off. Thought I had been very careful examining the exterior... not sure there is really any way to tell at this point other than opening it up and looking to see if the card is damaged.

Makes sense. See my post above about the crime ring. They had people pulling hundreds of cards off the racks. The the cards were tampered, then repackaged. Tampered cards from one store ended up at other stores pretty often.

Also, as a datapoint I received my replacement card from Incomm 6 days after reporting the tampered one in case anyone is wondering.

Not sure if this is relevant, but if you have a Discover card, go to Account Activity page. Expand one of the itemized retailer of your interest. Not sure if L3, but CVS seems to give more detail at least to Discover than I thought they would. If Discover can do it, I'm sure AMEX can do it as well. So, I started to use other drug stores rather than CVS since other drug store doesn't seem to give more data to Discover.

Has anybody else here had recent issues buying VGCs at CVS? My last 3 attempted purchases (all about 2 weeks ago) of 4 x $500 resulted in 1 of the VGCs activating properly, and the other 3 VGCs not activating. I could understand if the VGCs at one of the locations were compromised or there was a one-off activation error that occurred. But this happened to me at 3 DIFFERENT CVS locations on 3 different days, and even when purchasing 2 different type of VGC packaging (SS & Vanilla). I would have assumed this was more widespread and I'd see reports here of this, but I've seen none. It got to the point where I just stopped buying VGCs at CVS after this same thing happened to me for the 3rd time in a row.

I only can buy 2 $500 VGC at a time. All the CVS I go to state a 2k limit but the register rejects anything over 1k and refunds my card back. This all started to happen maybe in Feb 2024, Before I had no problem buying 2k in 1 transaction.