How to avoid gift card Amazon scam

When you are shopping online we are always looking for the bargain deal so we can save as much money as we can when making a purchase. Chances are you will go online compare prices to see where the savings are and for the most part Amazon is one of the largest online retail businesses on online will have the best deals online you can find. One of the reasons why Amazon has competitive pricing is because is they allow 3^rd party distributors to sell items. Which is great for the consumer but unfortunately some of these distributors can be con artist or fake sellers attempting to lure you to gain access to your credit card information or amazon gift card information.

The new scam is Amazon gift cards a gift cards which is like using cash. What a fake seller does is they want you to purchase an item from them online and when you want to pay for the purchase the fake seller instruct you to chat with them off the Amazon website. In that offline conversation they try to convince you to make a purchase of their product using an Amazon gift card. Since they are asking you to use a gift card you think this is a secure purchase.

Once you have purchase the Amazon gift card you then use it to make your purchase with the fake seller. They get your money from the gift card and you get nothing sent to your home. Since they are using this type of method to pay for the purchase it is very hard to trace. The use of the amazon gift card is almost like using cash at the point of sale.

So how can you avoid being a victim of this type of scam? first you should not communicate with any 3^rd party seller off the amazon site.  Amazon provides a method for anyone to communicate with a 3^rd party seller through the Amazon site.  If the seller wants you to call email them or text them then I would not use this seller at all.

Always use the amazon payment method provided by amazon any transaction made using their payment method only is covered. Just keep in mind no seller will tell you to purchase a gift card first in order to pay for any product sold on amazon. Should a seller make this request do not make the purchase and report it to Amazon.

I hope this post was helpful as always please leave a comment

Mark Carvajal