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Comment by pwython | Hacker News Reader

> "My dad is not a gullible man."

This article attempts to blame Target a couple of times for not doing enough. But this guy was also sitting in another store's parking lot, Safeway, reading off gift card codes to the "DEA."

No matter how smart you think your loved ones are, placing scrutiny on the stores the scammers have chosen (especially as a journalist) is going to do little except to add purchasing restrictions for everyone. A 17-year-old minimum wage cashier isn't going to save your dad, it's the last place to look to combat these "psychological tactics."

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There's a reason these scammers choose gift cards as their preferred way to get your money: gift cards have become the easiest way to move large amounts of money while minimizing the chances of getting caught.

Every other business that deals with the transfer of money (banks, for example) is expected to put strong measures in place to make sure that the money is traceable and that they're not helping criminals. Why shouldn't large companies like Target be held to a similar standard?

Moreover, the incentives here are very worrying. Yes this guy got scammed out of $3k, but Target also got $3k in revenue. Without some sort of penalty/punishment, Target is incentivized to do the bare minimum to minimize their PR exposure (which they can do by saying "we take this very seriously and have adopted some new policies" but not really acting on it) but to otherwise allow this to keep happening. As the prevalence of these gift card scams has skyrocketed, so have gift card sales for these large companies.

There's also an interesting sub-class of this scam that targets employees of certain size companies. Due to anti-bribery laws/rules/regulations gifts of cash to other companies are usually forbidden (and every employee with an expenditures line should generally be very aware of that), but non-cash redeemable gift cards are often still seen as fair "gifts" for various types of incentives/thanks/congratulations efforts. So gift card scams are sometimes even more effective for corporate employees, because corporations already abuse gift cards as a grease currency, and some corporate employees are very used to buying strange amounts of gift cards and giving them out in strange ways.

From what I understand, a retail store doesn’t make any profit selling gift cards for other stores.

The Safeway in this story didn’t make any money off of that $2k purchase of Target cards and it could’ve saved/boosted its reputation if it had some better protective measures in place. It also means that maybe people who would’ve spent money at Safeway now can’t because they’ve lost several thousand dollars.

> From what I understand, a retail store doesn’t make any profit selling gift cards for other stores.

That seems dubious, considering they dedicate precious shelf and display space to selling them. Accounting can get crazy in the real world, but clearly they have a motive to move these things. The cards are on the shelf because the cards make money for the store, somehow.

I know that I have a lot of gift cards that go unused for months, or never used at all. Probably a lot of profit in interest on holding all the money and keeping anything not claimed after a few years.

It might be true that they make no money from the sale itself, but those displays are likely from a third party that is paying for the shelf space.

If you do a search for something like "gift card distribution", there seems to be a bunch of marketing firms that you can pay to get gift cards made and put in stores.

perhaps they are banking on the person buying other profitable items while in the store for gift cards.

He keeps using terms like "intelligent", "cautious", "not gullible" to describe his dad but the man bought $3,000 of gift cards because he thought the DEA would accept them in exchange for not freezing his bank accounts.... the man's a moron. Sorry, but stupid is as stupid does. This is a very very stupid thing to believe.

My gut instinct is to agree with you... but I think we should be a little more sympathetic, since we have so many examples of seeming smart people falling for various scams.

I think it is foolish and wishful thinking to think we are immune to being scammed just because we can see through all these ruses when we read about them online.

Whenever something bad happens to other people, our immediate first reaction is to find out reasons why it would never happen to us. We wouldn't fall for it, I wouldn't put myself in that situation, I would see it a million miles away, I would have done this instead..... this is a defense mechanism because we don't want to feel vulnerable... we want to think that bad things are preventable, and we would always prevent the bad things.

This is simply not realistic, and gets in the way of empathy for people in bad situations. Just think back in your own life when things went wrong, and how looking back there are always things you could have done differently... but you didn't, because you are human and make mistakes and didn't have perfect knowledge of what was going on like you do in hindsight.

Do we have a lot of examples of smart people being scammed? There are certainly a lot of old people being scammed.

As silly as it might sound at face value, smart people can be psychologically manipulated into doing very stupid things.

I would love to hear the specific script they use to convince people to buy gift cards. Everything leading up to that I can understand someone being suckered into - but how the hell do they convince people that a government agent wants them to buy gift cards?!

Didn't RTFA but I know someone who fell for a similar scam.

It involved multiple scammers calling them, claiming to be the IRS. They had personal details about the victim (gleaned from public records, no doubt). When the victim agreed to make a payment under threat of arrest, they were told the government doesn't take credit card payments over the phone, but a special agreement with Amazon allowed them to accept gift cards as they are guaranteed value and "as good as cash."

From a distance it sounds ridiculous, but it was a surprisingly complex con with multiple participants and enough plausible details to make them seem legitimate. Refusing to take your credit card number over the phone must also disarm victims, what scammer would do so?

> From a distance it sounds ridiculous

Because it is ridiculous. There is nothing you could say that would make that sound legitimate to an otherwise intelligent, cautious person.

You'd think so, but it is possible to scam intelligent people. Intelligent people are still subject to the same fears, emotions, and cognitive biases and flaws that other people are. If a scammer can successfully harness those human weaknesses, intelligence might not be enough to save someone.

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/woman-loses-entire-life...

Some of this has been targeted at recent-immigrant ethnic communities from places where government corruption is endemic. From the point of view of the person being scammed, it actually is plausible that some person working for the IRS is demanding payment via a sketchy method.

The way con men are successful is usually not by directly convincing people that their scam is legit -- but instead they convince the person that they are trustworthy. Once they're seen as trustworthy, human brains tend to overlook facts, even obvious ones. Confidence scams work on a similar abuse of trust that April Fools jokes do... except they're a lot less funny.

Sorry but I just don't buy it. I cannot see how it's possible to persuade a smart person to do something incredibly stupid and diametrically opposed to their own interests. I really do believe that only stupid people can be quite so.... uhhh, stupid.

What if I told you that I can invest your money for a consistent 10-20% return, and I can even make you 5%+ during the 2008 recession. I beat everyone else's returns. The only thing is that I can't tell you exactly how I do it. Of course, an investment scheme this good has to be secret, so we don't do external audits, but my brother audits everything for me.

It would take a stupid person to believe a scam like that, wouldn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_investors_in_Bernard_L...

Sure, but everyone here is reacting with incredulity at the idea you could make any kind official payment with a stack of gift cards. It's like asking someone to pay their utility bill with Pokemon or MTG cards.

There are many examples of people who have been interviewed after being scammed who did know better, but did it anyway because they were successfully convinced their situation was a special exception. Gaslighting can really distort reality for some people.

While the majority of people who fall for this are elderly and aren’t as sharp as they used to be, they aren’t the only ones who are successfully tricked.

> they were successfully convinced their situation was a special exception. Gaslighting can really distort reality for some people

I mean, every rule does have exceptions. People are wired to think that way, because that's how it is. So manipulation can work by triggering that frame of mind.

Stores already do tons of stuff to try to thwart these.

I worked at a store years ago and we had all these things implemented:

- Limit on gift card purchase amounts per customer, per day.

- Stopped stocking Western Union cards because they were such a scam target.

- There was also a scam where scammers would call the store itself to pose as a "corporate employee" who was "trying to verify that the gift card redemption system was working" and would have the cashier activate a gift card, run it as cash, and read off the numbers. And apparently that worked well enough that every time we activated certain gift cards, a massive box popped up on the POS screen saying "IF THIS TRANSACTION IS HAPPENING OVER THE PHONE, HANG UP IMMEDIATELY AND CANCEL THE TRANSACTION."

At a certain point there's only so much that can be done by the store itself.

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