One of the ways that I generate points is through gift card reselling. Gift card reselling is not a super lucrative business, but depending on your relationships with other buyers, you can often find deals that are breakeven or better, allowing you to generate “pajama points”.
[Another day, another $900 profit reselling gift cards]
One source of gift card deals are grocery stores. Periodically, grocery stores will sell discounted gift cards which again can be a good source of slight profit and/or credit card points (not to mention tons of fuel rewards if your store offers those)
Gift card scam at Kroger
I saw an article one one of the local (Cincinnati) news sites today – Police warn of new gift card scam, with the source being a Facebook posting by the Blue Ash (Ohio) Police Department.
According to the police, “crafty criminals taped a different bar code to back of the gift card and that bar code scanned at Kroger. The criminals then received credit for our victims purchase.” I am not 100% sure what exactly they are talking about but I would assume something along the lines of the criminals printed out a bar code for some sort of reloadable debit card and taped it over the McDonalds bar code so when the unsuspecting person at Kroger bought the McDonalds card, it actually loaded money on to the criminal’s card? It seems like a lot would have to go right for this to actually work.
The picture the police posted is below
I’ll be honest – I can’t tell from that picture what is wrong. I see some indentations near the bottom gift card, but those appear to be part of the actual gift card packaging. The bar codes on top and bottom seem to match up so I’m not entirely sure what is going on.
In any case, this is just a note to be careful while purchasing gift cards. I have definitely been at stores buying gift cards where I’ve seen cards that appeared altered. And while I’d imagine it was likely to be nothing, I did not want to take the chance.
Have you ever seen this or another gift card scam?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
It looks like the entire lower portion is a sticker – both the red part and the bar code on the ‘gift card’. It looks to me like the bar code and the gift card are both fake and printed on the sticker along with the red border and the entire sticker is place over the lower part of the packaging.