The Gift Card Accountability Sink
Key topics
A heated debate is brewing around an article that challenges the conventional wisdom that gift card requests are always scams, with some commenters defending the author's contrarian view as "speaking the truth" due to their expertise in the payments field. Others, however, are skeptical, pointing out that the author's industry ties may be influencing their perspective and that, practically speaking, warning seniors about all gift card requests might be the most effective approach. As the discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that the real issue lies in the lack of guardrails around gift card transactions, making them vulnerable to abuse. The thread is sparking a nuanced conversation about the complexities of gift card payments and the need for clearer guidelines.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
43m
Peak period
66
0-6h
Avg / period
10
Based on 110 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 21, 2025 at 4:07 PM EST
12 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 21, 2025 at 4:50 PM EST
43m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
66 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 24, 2025 at 6:50 PM EST
9 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
>Of course it isn’t. Gift cards are a payments rail, and an enormous business independently of being a payments rail. Hundreds of firms will indeed ask you to pay them on gift cards!
That’s where I stopped reading. The author seems more interested in being contrarian for clicks than in giving practical advice. AARP is right here: being asked to pay by gift card is a major red flag, and unless you know the company personally, it’s time to walk away.
I'd pretty much back up AARP on this one. Asking for payment by gift card should in the majority of cases put one on guard.
The practical reality is acknowledged at the end of the post.
Even if, technically speaking, using gift cards as a payments instrument is not a scam 100% of the time, anyone but a non-expert should behave as if it's 100%.
I have never seen a legitimate business asking for payment in gift cards. I've encountered the traditional tradesmen offering discounts for cash, though.
Them: "But you did it right there."
Me: "And when you know enough about the subject to know why that's a valid exception to the rule, you'll be savvy enough to break the rule. Until then, don't." Chesterton's fence and all.
At no point did the article claim AARP was in the wrong for running those ads. But had you kept reading you’d maybe have understood that wasn’t the point nor the premise in the first place.
But I agree with you: the AARP is 100% right to be running PSAs like this. I’d be curious to hear more about how a shadow economy like this would/would not help unbanked people, which he implies but did not describe at all. But it certainly doesn’t change the point that gift cards are an effective vehicle for fraud, and anytime someone asks to pay you (or especially you to pay them) in gift cards… your scam senses should tingle.
AARP isn’t telling fibs. It’s giving sound advice.
The only legit use of a gift card is when you’re redeeming that gift card directly with the issuer. No business is going to request or require that you do that.
The examples he gives are predominantly around giving people the option, while the scams are very much pushing a requirement.
If someone wants you to get a gift card to pay them, and won't take cash or credit? Scam. If you have a gift card already and someone's willing to accept it in lieu of cash? Probably no more likely to be a scam than any other vendor?
In any case, I think this is almost a willful misunderstanding. Not only does it attack the straw man of "no one ever gets legitimately paid in gift cards", but literally the first counterexample, Paysafecard, isn't a gift card!
(edit: in retrospect "OTOH" was a poor choice of words since this isn't really a different point than the parent comment is making)
Most people who want to spend their money just do it using credit card, bank transfer, whatever.
At least 5% (rewards and inconvenience) but closer to 10-15% in my experience.
For a 20% discount on stores I use regularly I’ll get the gift card (usually buy $50 get $10 free).
It's not all that surprising that "just like cash, but less fungible" should have a different valuation than "cash", but there aren't all that many things that mimic cash like that.
https://www.fincen.gov/system/files/shared/CTRPamphlet.pdf
Is This Australia’s Most Easily Hacked Gift Card? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBarXDL23hs
of how thieves were abusing gift cards by imaging them in stores, waiting until purchased and "holding" value, then extracting that value with a little bit of cracking bad security
Originally I assumed it was due to customer education/fraud, however no additional signage is posted at the stores doing this. Second thought was people must think these cards are already activated, however there is tons of text stating these things are only activated at POS.
The retailers I mentioned are nationwide. However, they've only recently began to do this, and only in a few locations that I am aware of.
Source?
This guy purchased a gift card which turned out to be dodgy, and Apple locked his entire account. So there's definitely some kind of shenanigans possible with the current supply chain.
They said the CEO by name to my number. Of course it was a scam that had nothing to do with my CEO. I wonder how they got my number?
If someone did fall for it, the potential that your employees would spend real money that they wouldn’t get reimbursed for would definitely piss a lot of people off.
"Don't buy gift cards. Full stop."
The general scamminess around gift cards is far too high from all angles.
Anyone asking you to pay them in gift cards is a problem. The gift card processors have all manner of ways to preserve the float by flagging "fraud" in order to suspend your gift card until you waste time and give them personal information. The company behind your gift card can go bankrupt (see: Bed, Bath and Beyond and Fry's). And, finally, as we found from Apple, even redeeming a card can cause you problems.
Give cash. In spite of some hoity-toity nitwits who consider cash to be gauche for gifts, at no point in my life have I ever be disappointed to be given cash.
If you are one of those people afraid to give cash, here's what you do: go to the bank and ask for fresh bills. (You can also iron them yourself, I think.) I know of absolutely no one who would turn their nose at a fresh, crisp $100 bill, and it's not like $20s or $50s are much worse even if the $100 is king. They're just really satisfying when they're brand new.
Trust me, no one will complain.
Both 50 and 100 euro bills are less desirable and often harder to spend.
I can see if someone didn’t have any money and had a card and wanted to try and sell or exchange it, otherwise? Cash might have some limitations but none that are worse than a gift card.
Instead you can use your cash at a large number of retailers to acquire a card that’s got broad value and is suitable for electronic exchange, in exchange for a small tax (the price of the card plus whatever discount the recipient/exchange applies to its face value).
I’m wondering if this is the primary use case and that’s why I don’t really get it? I see the online aspect, but it comes with a whole other set of problems that for most cases it’s hard to imagine are easier to deal with than exchanging cash. But a way to send money across borders without any controls I can see why that might be popular. Hard to tie that back to advice the AARP should be giving though.
In a different direction, giving cash to a partner/vendor/competitor is pretty obvious to many laws as a bribe. Giving gift cards more resembles gifting swag or paying for a meal and is sometimes considered "allowed". Different companies have different views on that loophole, but some companies do take advantage of it. Enough companies at least did at one point that the "CEO is in a high-powered meeting and needs gift cards immediately" came from somewhere and it was probably that, wining and dining partners/vendors/competitors in "legally distinct from but quite resembling bribes".
> As Bits about Money has frequently observed, people who write professionally about money—including professional advocates for financially vulnerable populations—often misunderstand alternative financial services, largely because those services are designed to serve a social class that professionals themselves do not belong to, rarely interact with directly, and do not habitually ask how they pay rent, utilities, or phone bills.
This resonated for me, and reminded me of the way I and my formally-banked and formally-employed colleagues sometimes struggle to wrap our minds around payday lending (sure looks like usury from the security and comfort of a formal banking relationship!), remittances, hawala, pawn shops, Cash App, gift card exchanges, video game economies… for all the normative thinking in the professional classes, people sure do develop a kaleidoscopic array of approaches to storing and transmitting value.
“Just sanction [whoever]” or “just debank [whoever]” sounds to certain circles like an appealing tool to have—the modern equivalent of exile—but I have to imagine it’s probably healthy that such a tactic is hard for a state actor to apply in a totally watertight kind of way.
You have family you care about back in your home country, so you send them money from your better-paid foreign job - what's confusing about that?
Even if you’re such a person in the professional class, who sends money back to their family via formal means, you might not be sensitive to the means informally-employed people use to send money (or value) back to their families.
Any more than it occurs to you to go to a payday lender and pay $5 to get $50 today against your $250 paycheck next week, in order to make rent…
I do think there ought to be some sort of fallback banking and account denial review process, if we're going to make it that critical to society.
That serves the integrity of the risk-identification system by making it harder to game or evade, but we’re rightly allergic to other forms of justice meted out “because trust me, he’s probably no good…”
[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
I don't know if this has been explored, bit I think it's an interesting follow on to "all or nothing" watertight sanctions.
And sanctions aren't there to stop a country from doing things or forcing regime change. They're there to rob them of growth over time to make them into a non-threatening poor backwater over a decades long period.
Fascinating footnote.
Why take perfectly good cash and change it to something worse in every way? I cannot understand why so many people enthusiastically go out of their way to buy gift cards. Can you take my cash and convert it to something with the same function but with all kinds of restrictions and gotcha's? Sure no problem....
Not a good reason but it is a real one I have heard.
But from Patrick's description, it feels like the situations where it's (usually) not a scam are instances where paying by gift card is an option, not something the "seller" is pushing you hard to do, or even requiring you to do. That seems... okay? I personally would still pay with a credit card, but mayyyybe it's ok for someone who can't get a credit card to go the gift card route. But I would still be wary.
> The people of the United States, through their elected representatives and the civil servants who labor on their behalf, intentionally exempt gift cards from the Reg E regime in the interest of facilitating commerce.
This sort of phrasing about things kinda annoys me. Yes, "through their elected representatives...", technically true, but "the people of the United States", no, not really so much. I'm sure most people don't even know about these sorts of differences, and I'm sure the majority of people who are in favor of these sorts of protections on credit/debit cards would want them to apply to gift cards as well.
The problem with this sort of phrasing implies that the American people actively chose this, or even had any choice in the matter. We are limited in the political options that are put before us; we don't get a big menu of policy positions, check off the ones we like, and then a politician appears that matches all our preferences. Some people might -- very reasonably! -- prioritize other policy positions over gift card protection regulation, even if they want the latter as well.
I've got some gift cards sitting here--her health insurance has rewards for doing certain things, there's no way to get them as cash but you can buy gift cards for certain stores. Nothing scammy about it but I'm annoyed Amazon isn't an option because simply dumping them into my Amazon account would be the easiest solution.
Gift cards are the equivalent of buying dollars at 105 cents, but its not a scam, since everybody is upfront about the transaction.
[1]https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
I feel like that needs a "(currently but not for much longer)" caveat[0] to avoid being wildly disingenuous.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/11/trump-administratio... - "the CFPB [...] anticipates exhausting its currently available funds in early 2026.”
Could I improve my own privacy posture by just buying myself gift cards, if I can't use cash? Or that's just pushing all the data that the store would get onto the gift card company?
We don't let terrorists and robbers wander in, why do allow the digital equivalent?