Interesting Gift Card Interaction at Safeway

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arizonaguy
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Interesting Gift Card Interaction at Safeway

Post by arizonaguy »

I went to Safeway today to purchase a few gift cards for holiday gifts. As I was checking out, the cashier asked me a few questions (almost felt like I was at the airport) pertaining to the gift cards:

1.) Has anyone asked you for the number on the back of the card?
2.) Are you aware that gift cards cannot be returned?

I've bought gift cards at Safeway for years and have never ever been asked either of these questions. I'd have to imagine that there are theft rings approaching people asking for the numbers and then people are returning the gift cards without using them (but with the theft ring containing the numbers).
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Re: Interesting Gift Card Interaction at Safeway

Post by Romr123 »

I think it's more to prevent people being scammed rather than to protect the store--was at one of the local Rite Aid stores and was in line behind a woman (likely a regular customer) who was scammed over the phone where she was to read the numbers to the scammer. Took a little bit to realize that this wasn't a Rite Aid problem but was a police issue...store felt sorry for her but the $$$ was long gone.
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Re: Interesting Gift Card Interaction at Safeway

Post by storewanderer »

arizonaguy wrote: December 19th, 2022, 5:34 pm I went to Safeway today to purchase a few gift cards for holiday gifts. As I was checking out, the cashier asked me a few questions (almost felt like I was at the airport) pertaining to the gift cards:

1.) Has anyone asked you for the number on the back of the card?
2.) Are you aware that gift cards cannot be returned?

I've bought gift cards at Safeway for years and have never ever been asked either of these questions. I'd have to imagine that there are theft rings approaching people asking for the numbers and then people are returning the gift cards without using them (but with the theft ring containing the numbers).
I have never been asked these questions. However, if you pay at a cashier at CVS and Walgreens, a prompt comes up on the register when they total the transaction to tell the customer these two things. At Safeway once the gift card transaction hits a certain dollar amount a manager override is required to complete the transaction and the manager is supposed to tell the customer those things in that case. At Kroger once the transaction is over $500 it has to be processed at customer service and there are some protocols there.

I have run into a few delayed activations on gift cards recently where the card is not activated for between 4-24 hours from purchase.

On simple purchases of a few $25 of a few $50 gift cards to assorted retailers, this type of behavior is not really necessary. If someone comes up with a stack of $500 worth of Amazon cards or $500 worth of Google Cards then it is another story.

One grocer I was at recently seemed to be having problems with Home Depot gift cards. They had a sign on the rack saying Home Depot gift cards may be purchased with cash only and limit $100 per person per day, no credit/debit/checks.
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Re: Interesting Gift Card Interaction at Safeway

Post by Alpha8472 »

Many chains are educating their employees about scams. Criminals purchase large amounts of gift cards with stolen credit or debit cards. There are also online scams where people are told to buy gift cards so that they can supposedly win prizes from a person sending an email. There are many online and telephone scams.

Employees have to ask certain questions to see if customers are going to become victims of scams.
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Re: Interesting Gift Card Interaction at Safeway

Post by storewanderer »

Alpha8472 wrote: December 20th, 2022, 12:43 am Many chains are educating their employees about scams. Criminals purchase large amounts of gift cards with stolen credit or debit cards. There are also online scams where people are told to buy gift cards so that they can supposedly win prizes from a person sending an email. There are many online and telephone scams.

Employees have to ask certain questions to see if customers are going to become victims of scams.
Large gift card transactions with counterfeit cash are also a major problem. Broadly speaking, large gift card transactions tend to be a problem period. But there are many legitimate large gift card transactions especially around the holidays. The credit card networks are getting a lot better at flagging fraudulent overly large transactions as are the secondary fraud checks after the card is approved that are being done by the gift card processing networks. There is still a ton of fraud with gift cards. I don't think there is a good answer to this problem other than smaller denomination cards and purchase amount limits but the gift card sellers don't like any of that and purchase amount limits violate the credit card network rules. Delayed activation is also something that is helping. If a store is suspicious of a gift card transaction they are able to call Blackhawk after it approves and get a transaction delayed activation (they have to do this really fast before the customer has a chance to drain the cards).

Also you may have noticed some retailers used to have an option where you could "combine" multiple small gift cards over to a single card. This "combine" feature has been eliminated by some retailers, notably Wal Mart on their gift cards. There is a reason for this- this "combine" feature was being used to quickly drain fraudulent transaction cards onto other cards and while in theory it should all be traceable, it was easier to just shut down the option to combine/merge cards.

There are a ton of scams where phone scammers call people and tell them they need to go buy gift cards and read the gift card numbers to them or the IRS will come arrest them (actually, IRS makes all communications in writing of that nature they never make that kind of communication via phone), or the power company is going to shut their power off if they don't comply with their order to go buy $200 of Google Cards and read the Google Card numbers to the person on the line...
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Re: Interesting Gift Card Interaction at Safeway

Post by mbz321 »

storewanderer wrote: December 20th, 2022, 12:51 am

Also you may have noticed some retailers used to have an option where you could "combine" multiple small gift cards over to a single card. This "combine" feature has been eliminated by some retailers, notably Wal Mart on their gift cards. There is a reason for this- this "combine" feature was being used to quickly drain fraudulent transaction cards onto other cards and while in theory it should all be traceable, it was easier to just shut down the option to combine/merge cards.
the line...
Interesting. Are you talking about in-store or online/on an app? I know Target still lets you merge gift card balances together through their App. And not exactly retail, but Dunkin' lets you do the same.
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Re: Interesting Gift Card Interaction at Safeway

Post by storewanderer »

mbz321 wrote: December 21st, 2022, 5:46 pm

Interesting. Are you talking about in-store or online/on an app? I know Target still lets you merge gift card balances together through their App. And not exactly retail, but Dunkin' lets you do the same.
Online/on an app. Wal Mart specifically has disabled this function somewhat recently.

Starbucks still lets you merge cards together too. But I think Starbucks and Dunkin are talking a lot smaller dollar transactions so while there is definitely fraud it is not close to the magnitude the retailers see (but a franchisee who sells $100 of gift cards and got a counterfeit $100 bill for payment rejected in their deposit sure sees it as a big deal). McDonalds locations throughout the west have signs posted that they only accept cash for gift cards and will usually not sell you anything over about $25 either. The registers prompt for manager approval after $25.
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Re: Interesting Gift Card Interaction at Safeway

Post by BillyGr »

storewanderer wrote: December 21st, 2022, 11:50 pm
mbz321 wrote: December 21st, 2022, 5:46 pm

Interesting. Are you talking about in-store or online/on an app? I know Target still lets you merge gift card balances together through their App. And not exactly retail, but Dunkin' lets you do the same.
Online/on an app. Wal Mart specifically has disabled this function somewhat recently.

Starbucks still lets you merge cards together too. But I think Starbucks and Dunkin are talking a lot smaller dollar transactions so while there is definitely fraud it is not close to the magnitude the retailers see (but a franchisee who sells $100 of gift cards and got a counterfeit $100 bill for payment rejected in their deposit sure sees it as a big deal). McDonalds locations throughout the west have signs posted that they only accept cash for gift cards and will usually not sell you anything over about $25 either. The registers prompt for manager approval after $25.
That makes sense - most people (even those doing things illegally) would have far less use for hundreds of dollars' worth of gift cards to a food place (after all, how much can you spend at once, unless you start buying food for the entire neighborhood) than for the same amounts at Walmart (with all the options of things to buy, either to use or that could be turned into real cash somewhat easily).
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