Sorry if the formatting is bad I’m typing this out on my phone as I’m away for the holidays. My father gifted me 3 Amazon gift cards today and when I went to go and redeem them I found all of them had a small part of the code scratched off. I’ll attach a photo but they are all scratched off in the same way. I opened them brand new from the packaging you see in the photo. I didn’t notice for the first card because I didn’t think anything was off yet, but the second two cards sticker that covers the code was not properly centered. Not sure if this means they were peeled and replaced or if it’s normal for them to be off center. I’m going to talk to my dad and see if he has the receipt so I can try to exchange them. Has anyone else seen or heard of this? I’m really just wondering what may have happened here. The only thing I could think of is someone on the assembly line stole the codes but I would that the making of these gift cards would be almost entirely automated.

Two days ago I went to a Walgreens to purchase a $500 gift card for myself to buy laptop nvme hard drive that was on sale during the 2 day sale. I made this purchase with cash money dollar bills.

As soon as I got to the car after purchasing it , I opened the card to see two numbers from the claim code scratched off and two number from the serial (“card number”) at the bottom

Normally, customer service can resolve this , if you can give them the complete serial, however , that both the serial and the claim code were scratched - this points to a scam. The frustrating thing here is they first said they could help me with only 3 digits of the code. I gave them this, not good enough, they wanted the last 5 digits of the claim code, I gave them this , still not good enough - they want a picture of the back of the card. I sent this , still not good enough, they want a pic of the receipt. I give them a pic of the receipt with the card next to it, front and back of the card… still not good enough.

Then it escalated to fraud dept , it has been over 24 hours and no response from fraud, i emailed [email protected] ,[email protected] , and [email protected] . I tried to call customer service to get someone to connect me to fraud dept but it is apparently email contact only. The csr suggested I go to walgreen about this - but of course they cant do anything. However, when I went to walgreens to speak with the manager - they tell me this happened to someone else yesterday, that someone purchased a card that had been tampered with. The Walgreens then pulled all of their gift card both Amazon and non Amazon. After making that call to Amazon today, Amazon locked my account. I think this may be due to I only use gift cards to make Amazon purchases. I don’t use a credit card, so there are a lot of gift card redeems on my account.

Is there anything else anyone can suggest I do? I am considering filing a police report with the city and Walgreens will cooperate. Beyond that , I could hire a lawyer. I would like Amazon to talk to the manager at that Walgreens who will back me up this is not an isolated incident, that they are familiar with me buying gift cards there etc but no idea how to put Amazon in touch with the Walgreens. I could physically travel to whatever Amazon corporate location I can reach and speak to the highest up person I can get…

Not sure what else would have to happen for Amazon to give me my funds, I have already sent them all the info I possibly can and the fact they still have not credited my account - I feel they aren’t going to credit my account.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated .

Edit: the scam as I understand it , is someone stole unscanned never loaded Amazon cards, then recorded the info- put everything back together carefully , they even sell the peel tape on Amazon - then they put the card back on the shelf after defacing the info so the victim (me) can’t call into redeem before they do. They check their list of claim codes and get your funds before Amazon can help, searching Reddit this actually is far more common than I thought . The only way to prevent this is to actually open the gift card at the register when it is purchased. It is possible this was a random person scamming the store, an employee, or someone that supplies the store with the cards. Most likely a random person.

Edit2: I got an email back from Amazon saying they will refund the $500 Monday. They came to the same conclusion about the card being tampered with before I purchased it. I think sending the emails to those 3 I listed got through to someone. Searching Reddit saved me imo

Edit3: today is Monday, Amazon refunded the $500.

Edit4: continuing to follow up with Amazon , they actually asked what items I was going to buy on Amazon day then credited that difference amount to my account. ($275) This is above and beyond what I expected to happen. I am a happy customer. Had to update this post.