SALT LAKE CITY — You better watch out, you better not cry, better not pout, I'm telling you why... SCAMMER Claus is already in town, and he’s trying to swindle you into buying him a present!
It’s becoming one of the most common scams out there:
“The biggest red flag possible is if they are asking you for a gift card,” said Blake Young, the assistant director for the Utah Division of Consumer Protection.
And they have more than one method to convince you.
“If someone calls you claiming to be the IRS or law enforcement or the courts because you’ve missed jury notice and they’re demanding a gift card or some other type of unusual payment, that is not how it works. That is not what we take for payment. It is a scam,” said Young.
Sometimes they convince you that you’ve won a prize and all you must do is give them a little moolah just to make sure it’s yours.
They’ll use time as a tactic to pressure you into sending it.
“They’re trying to harp on that urgency from a more positive side,” said Young. “Do you think you’ve won? You think you’ve made all this money, you’ve had a windfall, this is wonderful. This is just going to cost you a little money to get the money into your account. Who wouldn’t make that deal? The problem is, it’s not real.”
Then there are tech support scams — perhaps the most convincing of the gift card scams.
“They will have someone on the phone, oftentimes they will call you out of the blue or you will click on a pop-up message that says, ‘Call this phone number.' You will talk to a person who claims to be from a legitimate technology vendor, oftentimes from the manufacturing or operating system of a computer. They will then claim your computer has all sorts of bad spyware and viruses on it and they will need to remote connect into your computer so that they can fix it,” Young explained. “They will oftentimes ask for payment through gift cards, which again, doesn’t make a lot of sense why a tech-support company that would presumably need to meet payroll is asking you for gift cards for an online store.”
If you find you’ve fallen victim to a gift card scam, report the scam right away. Companies like Apple, Google Play, Amazon and Walmart have specific guidelines for reporting fraud.
It also doesn’t hurt to ask for a refund; some companies can stop the scam and return your money if the funds are still on the card.
