Someone is asking you to pay with gift cards. That's always a scam
Gift card payment requests appear across dozens of different scam types: fake IRS agents demanding back taxes, tech support 'engineers' charging for a virus removal, romance scammers in emergencies, utility companies threatening disconnection, even scammers impersonating your own boss in a 'CEO fraud' email. The payment method is the tell that unifies them all.
Scammers demand gift cards because they are functionally identical to cash: instant, untraceable, and irreversible. Once you read the card number and PIN over the phone or send a photo, the money is gone. There is no chargeback, no bank recall, and no consumer protection.
This is so well-established that the FTC, the FBI, and every major retailer (Best Buy, Amazon, Google, Apple) have issued repeated public warnings: no government agency, utility company, tech support service, or legitimate business will ever instruct you to pay using gift cards. Ever.
🚩 Red flags to watch for
- ▶Any instruction to pay for anything using gift cards — regardless of who is supposedly asking.
- ▶You're told to buy cards from a specific store (often multiple stores to avoid triggering limits) and call back immediately with the codes.
- ▶Instructions to scratch off and photograph the back of the card and send the image.
- ▶The payer is described as 'IRS', 'HMRC', 'Microsoft', 'Google Play', 'Apple', or your employer.
- ▶You're told to keep the purchase secret, not to tell the cashier what the cards are for.
- ▶A sense of urgency: arrest will happen, service will be cut, computer will be wiped — unless you pay now.
✅ What to do
- 1Hang up, delete the email, or disengage from the conversation immediately.
- 2No government body, tech company, or utility will ever accept gift cards as payment — if someone demands it, it is definitively a scam.
- 3If you've already purchased cards and read the codes to someone: call the card issuer's customer service immediately. Some issuers can freeze the balance if the funds haven't been redeemed yet.
- 4Report the incident to the FTC (reportfraud.ftc.gov) or Action Fraud — these reports actively help investigators track the operations.
📣 Where to report (by country)
🇺🇸 United States
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
- Action Fraud
- Police Scotland — call 101
🇦🇺 Australia
🇨🇦 Canada
🌍 Everywhere else
- Contact your local police and your bank immediately
- If money was sent, ask your bank about a recall request — act within hours
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Common questions
I bought the cards before realising it was a scam. Can I get the money back?
Contact the card issuer immediately — the number is usually on the back of the card or the packaging. If the scammer hasn't yet redeemed the funds, some issuers can freeze the balance. Act within minutes if possible. If already redeemed, recovery is unlikely, but filing a report with the FTC helps build cases against the operators.
The person said Apple Pay or Google Play gift cards are accepted everywhere. Is that true?
Legitimate businesses accept gift cards as a courtesy for their own products — not as a general-purpose payment method for taxes, fines, or services. The scammer's logic only sounds plausible under pressure. Step back and ask: would the IRS really accept iTunes cards?