Gift Card That Is Not A Gift
Francine Brevetti
What the hell was I thinking?
I should have known from the beginning that it was a scam.
After all, I use a PC and the caller said he was from Apple.
After insistent calls, I finally listened to him tell me my personal computer was compromised and had been hacked.
How did he hook me? He played on my insecurity about technology.
And he was relentless, so very insistent.
He must have taken a picture of my computer and its workings.
He took me on a tour of my PC and showed me all the places where it had been hacked, according to him. He did the same for my iPhone.
How could I have been so mindless? What kept me from stopping and thinking?
Will
I’m trying to have compassion for myself now.
Over the two days I spent talking to this scalawag, I lost $2000.
This is how it happened:
He convinced me that he would fix my system and I would have to pay for his repair service by using the value in Google Play Cards. I complained but I was obedient. I went to the local CVS and bought $500 worth of Google Play Cards.
Then he said I had to buy another $500 worth, but CVS would sell me no more.
So I went to Walgreens and bought the other $500 worth.
Why did I think this is legitimate at all? I’m still banging my head over that. Did he tell me I would get the value back? He did not.
At this juncture, with $1000 worth of gift cards, he instructed me to scratch the gummy part on the backside and read him the code numbers.
I did this.
When I pressed him to explain why I needed gift cards, he said I wouldn’t understand because I was old and not tech-savvy.
I ignored that insult and said, “well, educate me.”
He gave some vague reason that fogged me, and I didn’t pursue it.
He also critiqued my iPhone and told me that it had been compromised in several ways. He claimed to make several adjustments to it as he had done on my computer.
He asked me then to go to Target and buy another $1000 worth. I told him I was tired, and I wouldn’t do it.
My scammer said he would be willing to go to Target himself and buy them for me. By tomorrow, he assured me, he would have the value and apply it to the procedure of repairing my computer.
The next day, predictably, he called me again.
I asked him if he had bought the Target gift cards. He said no he had not had the time but that I should do so that day.
Believe me, I am not a patsy. I am assertive and stand up for myself.
But I will crumpled this time.
I went to that store and bought $1000 more worth of cards.
I sat down ready to call him and read off the codenames to him.
Amazingly, three Target employees assembled around me and urged me not to call in the codenames. Looking back on it, I realize they must have witnessed enough of this scam already.
“Go to the Apple Store,” one of them stressed. It was only four blocks away. I agreed and went there.
All this time I was walking to the Apple Store, I had my iPhone on so that he could communicate with me. But I hadn’t spoken to him since I left the Target on the way to Apple.
Walking up the street, I could hear him calling out from the phone in my backpack, “what has happened? What has happened?”
I entered Apple and explained what had been going on to one of the Apple representatives. This blessed soul commandeered my phone, scolded my scam artist and told him to begone.
And that was the end. I continued to get phone calls from this reprobate for couple of days but I did not respond.
Eventually, trustworthy tech fellows reassured me that neither my computer nor my iPhone had been compromised by this rascal and his confederates.
I called my bank and credit card companies to report fraud. Of course,
I filed a report with the Federal Trade Commission. This is their URL: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/features/scam-alerts.
The Federal Trade Commission data show that 26 percent of scammers asked for gift cards and “reload cards” in 2018, versus just 7 percent in 2015.
Todd Hartman, Best Buy’s General Counsel and Chief Risk & Compliance Officer said, “They are nearly as untraceable as cash and are much more transferable.”
I’ll never get the money back because it was taken out of my debit card not my credit card.
And as my cousin Linda, whose career was in fraud at the Bank of America, observed, “you willingly gave the money away.”
Is there a silver lining? Well, I still have $1000 worth of value in my Target gift cards because I had not divulged the code numbers to him. Of course, I would have rather had the cash value but I’m buying a lot of useful stuff.
It was a hard and painful way to purchase toilet paper, shampoo, and cotton puffs.
