My Google news feed definitely knows what gets my blood curdling. Lately, I’ve come across a few articles about people getting scammed through the purchase of gift cards. It’s not the scams where you’re called by a “government agency” saying you need to buy gift cards to avoid getting your bank account frozen (that’s an entirely different rant! Deep breaths….) but one where when you go to pay with the card, someone has already used it, leaving you with a zero balance and scratching your head (I swear there was money gifted on this!). The Federal Trade Commission reported that by “the first nine months of 2021, 40,000 people reported $148 million stolen using gift cards. And because the vast majority of frauds are not reported to the government, this reflects only a fraction of the harm these scams cause.” That’s a lot of people, folks! 

A recent story involved a couple that bought a bunch of Visa Gift cards through a promotion at their grocery store, and everything went business-as-usual until one day, the cards were wiped clean, totaling over $300 in losses. With a lot of frustration and time, they finally got their money back, but it wasn’t without the run around since the store they purchased it from couldn’t do much as it was supplied by a third-party vendor. 

Another story was a family in need that received a gift card over the holidays from their local Sherriff’s Office. It was a generous $300 gift card to a big name store, but by the time they used it, they found that it had already been used and only $24 had remained. When they checked the details on the purchases, they were all completed prior to when the family received the gift. 

So how does this happen? Typically, it’s with big chains where scammers will capture the gift card numbers while at the store, and tamper with the security covering that blocks either the pin or the last four digits on the card. They then log the card number online through the retailer’s site and wait for it to be activated. 

This is just one of the many reasons DONO was created. Gift Cards can get lost, stolen, and in the cases mentioned above, scammed. You wonder, how, in this age where you think security is at the forefront, is this even happening? Well, we at DONO take security and seriously and make it hard for such scams to exist. By using the gift card through your smart phone, the number is generated so only you can see it and you always have access to your balance. You can have the ease of mind when gifting the card as well, that the amount you send, will be the amount they receive. $148 million in stolen gift cards is a hard number to swallow. We hope through the use of DONO, this number can be at $0 as more people take to gifting through our easy to use and most importantly, safe, DONO app.