{"id":920,"date":"2010-06-24T07:53:38","date_gmt":"2010-06-24T14:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=920"},"modified":"2010-06-24T04:04:32","modified_gmt":"2010-06-24T11:04:32","slug":"oh-great-yet-another-free-gift-card-scam-text-messages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=920","title":{"rendered":"Oh great, yet another free gift card scam (text messages)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve previously reported on bogus free gift card <a href=\"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=630\" target=\"_blank\">scams on Facebook<\/a>, and bogus free gift card <a href=\"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=913\" target=\"_blank\">SPAM emails<\/a>, well now there is another tact that scammers are using by offering free gift cards:\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/8301-504083_162-20008611-504083.html\" target=\"_blank\">text messaging<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It goes like this, you receive an unsolicited text message purporting to be from Wal-Mart and offering free gift cards under a customer appreciation program.\u00a0 You call the number in the text message and they ask for your personal information, possibly including your social security number, and a credit card to pay for shipping and handling to send the gift card to you.<\/p>\n<p>What they are really doing is harvesting your sensitive personal information, possibly for identity theft, and charging you many times the quoted shipping and handling cost for a &#8220;free&#8221; gift card you will never receive.<\/p>\n<p>I am really scratching my head as to why people are so gullible?\u00a0 Who in their right mind thinks that companies profit from giving away free $1,000 gift cards?\u00a0 Why don&#8217;t people use more common sense about things like this?<\/p>\n<p>If something seems a bit too good to be true, at least <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\" target=\"_blank\">Google<\/a> it or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bing.com\" target=\"_blank\">Bing<\/a> it (or <a href=\"http:\/\/bingle.nu\/\" target=\"_blank\">Bingle<\/a> it) before you go off and give some unknown person your sensitive personal and financial information?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve previously reported on bogus free gift card scams on Facebook, and bogus free gift card SPAM emails, well now there is another tact that scammers are using by offering free gift cards:\u00a0 text messaging. It goes like this, you receive an unsolicited text message purporting to be from Wal-Mart and offering free gift cards [&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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920","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=920"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":922,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920\/revisions\/922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}