At least $800 worth of fraudulent Amazon gift cards sold in Kitchener

An act of good will turned into a bad loss for a Kitchener man. CTV’s Spencer Turcotte reports.

Gift card scams are becoming increasingly common, and a Kitchener man is among the latest victims.

Scott Shea is the co-founder of Navigate Realty. He went to the Shoppers Drug Mart inside Sunrise Centre to get some Amazon gift cards as a way to say thank you to his clients.

“Found the kiosk, grabbed a whole stack of them – 12 of them actually,” said Shea.

They were $100 each so in total there was $1,200 in Amazon gift cards.

“Went up to the cashier, she had to rip the back open, scan it. Normal things,” said Shea.

Then, things were suddenly not normal. A couple of weeks after handing out the gift cards, clients began pointing out to Shea that the cards didn’t work.

“Turned out eight of [them] were compromised,” said Shea.

Fellow business partner Jawad Elidrissi-Elawad said they were shocked to find this out.

“I had to call people and ask for the cards back,” explained Elidrissi-Elawad, adding that the card numbers were required for an investigation.

It meant they were out $800 and Amazon confirmed the cards were redeemed by someone else. But they informed Shea that it was up to Shoppers Drug Mart to resolve the issue.

Shea got nowhere. Over the course of approximately a month, his claim was denied over and over.

Data Risk Canada CEO Clauidu Popa says these scams are far too common these days.

“Gift cards are a scammer’s favourite currency because they’re very quick to use. They’re difficult to trace and they’re very difficult to reverse once it happens,” Popa said.

He said the scam can happen in many ways, such as someone coming into a store to copy the cards, having someone replace the numbers on them or sometimes the employees can be in on it too.

“We see more and more stores that have these cards behind panes of glass or behind the cashier, and those are the ones that are a lot more safe to use,” said Popa.

Shea thought he was out of luck until CTV News reached out to Loblaw, the parent company of Shoppers Drug Mart, to see where things went wrong.

“Unfortunately, gift card fraud is an issue impacting the retail sector as a whole. Our store teams are trained to recognize tampering and other fraudulent situations involving gift cards, doing their best to intercept suspicious transactions before purchase,” a statement from Loblaw read, in part. “We’ve looked into this incident and have escalated the matter with our gift card vendor. We have since reached out to the customer to make it right.”

Shea will now get an $800 Shoppers Drug Mart gift card as a refund.

“Thank you. Literally you reached out and then someone calls me to say, ‘We’ll take care of this,’” Shea said during his interview with CTV News.

He will use the gift card to purchase the Amazon cards again. This time, they’ll be digital gift cards.

“Digital gift cards have not had an opportunity to be physically tampered with,” said Popa.

It’s advised people continue to report these cases to the Anti-Fraud Centre or to police, which Shea did. It helps create awareness, Popa said.

The Navigate Realty team just hopes their thank you to customers works this time.