Gift cards represent a great promotional chance for financial institutions with the possibilities of especially Visa lives. Gift cards in the US have become extremely popular especially bought by men who do not know what to buy for their beloved ones so they can now give them a gift card with the preset credit option. A growing number of shops treats gift cards as ordinary bankcards and accept them without a word.
Being convenient for the consumer, gift cards are the happiness of shop owners too because every upcoming costs here are paid by the gifting person. This way shops can count an accurate income on gift cards. Many gift cards can only be used for one brand or at one shop, with the exception of Visa whose gift cards can be overall used. Representing such a friendly option for both parties that have started with less control and security over these cards, it is natural that the first gift card frauds have already happened.
Shop owners deal with the controlling, filtering and determining of a gift card fraud a lot harder. Let us now see some of the most common ways of gift card fraud:
Gift cards have similar looks to ordinary bankcards. They come with a number ID but no personal information is needed for someone to purchase such card. This makes them extremely hard to detect. The common way as fraudsters do is that they get the ID and bin numbers of gift cards; then they wait till someone buys the card which means a short time if they take the necessary steps. They wait until someone buys the card and so the fraudsters go shopping too. They are quick, as they have to be before anyone catching on them. Sometimes amounts on gift cards even exceed USD 500, especially before main gifting seasons, birthdays or anniversaries.
These gift cards usually are emptied out before anyone can go shopping with them. It is a bad experience leaving both shoppers and shops with a bitter taste in their mouth. It is to the shops best interest not to let these sorts of frauds happen.
Gift card issuers can only avoid these experiences if they build together a well working gift card monitoring system, which includes the registration of everyone with basic personal data and a home address or zip who have acquired such card. It is essential to know these details for the card maker in order take the necessary steps, among which one is to get into a Bin database checker, which keeps track of an extreme volume credit, debit and other card related information.
Thanks to the possibility of bin checking, the protection of gift cards against frauds has already started. Bin database and registering helps a lot. Shops must scan their payments and apply a much better security system, which includes the bin database checker.
BIN database can show such gift cards as VISA or others that were issued by a financial institute.
To identify a gift card, look at 5th parameter:
463502;VISA;METABANK;DEBIT;GIFT;UNITED STATES;US;USA;840;HTTPS://WWW.METABANK.COM/;1.866.550.6382
