Is there some secret giftcard doubling jutsu in not aware of?
Some people like to use a stored balance as a financial discipline tool. Don’t put a “real” funding source on the account and then you can only spend the $100 you committed to, and not go whale-mad and drop $500 on premium currencies.
This gift card costs $150 tho
Problem: They paid $150 for $100 in gift cards.
Why lose $50?
People trying to refund a tech support company after accidentally transferring too much money to themselves at the DOS prompt.
Money laundering
Likely this. Gift cards are popular purchases when using stolen credit card details. The online order makes it easier since there’s no physical card/chip needing to be replicated.
Quite possibly related to the Steam gift card scam https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/09A1-E754-1D86-DDC9
Often all the shops round here are sold out of steam gift cards for this reason. It’s sad, I spoke to a store worker about it, they explain to people they are getting scammed but they want the cards anyway.
As someone that used to buy these overpriced cards for PSN: A legit reason is that Sony didn’t accept local credit cards, you needed to have an international one to buy games directly, so a lot of people just resold these gift cards to us poor mortals with our useless credit cards.
Either that or drug money laundering.
At a guess:
- People with steam accounts and VPNs in countries that steam doesn’t operate in. Steam will block your “foreign” credit card as a fraud risk, but eBay dgaf cos it’s the sellers problem if they get ripped off
- This is probably a pretty convenient way to send small amounts of money to people in a way that looks pretty legit. Arrange to buy some drugs off someone over telegram, they get you to buy a “steam card” from them, they send an envelope with a blank bit of cardboard and the drugs
I’m leaning towards explanation 2
Yup. And nobody but their customers will buy (since it’s $150 for a $100 card) so they don’t have to worry about buying a card to send a real customer to look legit.
There are two kind of buyers, this smart guy:
and grandpa, who bought it for his grandson billy:
So the first guy bought it for 100, suggesting the price used to be 100, and all those purchases may not have be crazy.
