{"id":1205,"date":"2010-09-30T05:04:38","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T12:04:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=1205"},"modified":"2010-09-30T05:04:38","modified_gmt":"2010-09-30T12:04:38","slug":"beware-wal-mart-gift-card-telephone-scam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=1205","title":{"rendered":"Beware Wal-Mart gift card telephone scam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve seen reports previously about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chase-sucks.org\/wp-admin\/post.php?post=2746&amp;action=edit\" target=\"_blank\">telephone scams<\/a> where thieves call people and tell them there is a problem with their bank account and they need to verify information.\u00a0 People seem to trust that a phone call is legitimate and readily hand over personal information, including account numbers and passwords. The results of this of course are disastrous.<\/p>\n<p>This scam seems to have migrated over to include gift cards as we&#8217;ve just seen a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.daytondailynews.com\/news\/dayton-news\/beware-of-telephone-scam-about-wal-mart-gift-cards-group-warns-952298.html\" target=\"_blank\">report<\/a> of someone receiving a phone call claiming they won a Wal-Mart gift card and a credit card was necessary to complete the award.\u00a0 They of course never received the gift card but instead were treated to a large charge on their credit card bill.<\/p>\n<p>A simple rule holds true for avoiding scams, whether it is through email or by phone; don&#8217;t trust any information unless you initiated it.\u00a0 If you receive an email asking you to click a link, don&#8217;t trust it.\u00a0 The safest way is to go to the website directly by typing the URL into your browser.\u00a0 If you receive a phone call asking you for information, unless you are familiar with the person, don&#8217;t trust them.\u00a0 Find the number yourself, call the institution, and verify the information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve seen reports previously about telephone scams where thieves call people and tell them there is a problem with their bank account and they need to verify information.\u00a0 People seem to trust that a phone call is legitimate and readily hand over personal information, including account numbers and passwords. The results of this of course [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scams","category-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1205"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1207,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205\/revisions\/1207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}