In this day and age, scammers keep on getting creative on how they can cheat someone of their hard-earned money.

It started from African princes needing money, outright solicitation through misrepresentation, or dating someone using somebody else’s face then asking for money outright.

While most of us have learned to identify and shrug off these attempts, a sector in society is still the most vulnerable – the elderly.

One of the scams they’re most vulnerable to is gift card scams. Crooks would call them up and tell them convoluted threats where the only solution is to pay them with gift cards.

These events were so widespread that retailers started training their staff to detect when someone was being scammed into converting their money into gift credits.

This is exactly what happened to Sophia Rossi, a staff from Safeway, and Jean, a client of hers.

She told News 5 that she received a phone call from an “officer”. The said officer threatened her with jail time if she didn’t cooperate:

“If I didn’t cooperate, then it was going to be in the newspaper this morning and everybody would know and they were going to strip me of my Social Security card and close all the different accounts of stuff that were in my name, and I’m like, ‘you got a be kidding’. He said, ‘then you’re going to go to jail’ and I’m like, ‘what?’ He said, ‘yeah, we got a warrant out for you.’ That’s what got me. That scared the hell out of me.”

To get off the hook, she was told to eBay gift cards worth $700.

The call sounded urgent and it scared Jean. She found no choice but to drive to Safeway and do what the crooks were telling her.

Rossi and another staff member at a Safeway in Colorado noticed that Jean was a bit distressed.

They took her aside and asked her what’s going on.

Rossi shared the encounter with News 5:

“One of my other cashiers started talking to her because they noticed she was panicking. And so, we pulled her aside, we’re like ‘What’s going on?’”

Fortunately for Jean, staff from Safeway were trained to identify these things.

Rossi called the Woodland Park Police and explained to Jean how the scam works.

In the interview with News 5, she warned consumers of the scam:

“Social Security numbers are brought up, or I’m making a purchase on one website but having to get gift cards for another website, or my computer’s been compromised stuff like that. You’re never going to need large amounts of money in like Google Play gift cards. It’s not going to happen. So right away I recognized that that’s what it was.”

This statement can be confirmed with FTC’s guidelines. They explained that no entity will ask for payment in the form of gift cards.

Since 2015, the incidence of gift card scams has increased by 270%.

People lost $53 million dollars in 2018 – all of it was paid in gift cards.

Rossi and her team were just grateful for the opportunity to help and would never think twice to do it again. And for Jean, the efforts of Safeway employees meant so much more to her:

“Too many times things happen and people just look the other way and keep on going. But this is great because somebody cares enough to do this and get the information out.”

Watch how this Safeway employee saves a distressed senior from a scam in the video below.

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Source: YouTube – KOAA 5, Flickr, Federal Trade Commission