One woman claims she lost hundreds of dollars after purchasing a Walmart gift card.
Susan Kuntz bought a $1,000 gift card at a Walmart in Houston.
When she checked to see the balance on her cards, she found that some of them were already completely gone.
Three cards worth a total of $800 were erased.
“I was the only one with the card, so the question was, ‘How could this happen?'” Kuntz told NBC affiliate KPRC.
“And if this is happening to us, who else has this happened to?”
Kuntz said he plans to hand out cards to families in need at his church.
“If we didn’t know this, we would have given out cards to families,” Kuntz said.
“They would have filled their baskets with toys and food. They would go to the register and the card the church gave them would be empty. That would be terrible.”
When Walmart did not refund her money, she filed a police report.
“They’re wondering if this is perhaps an inside job, or if it’s just a situation involving people figuring out how to get Walmart cards, so they can use them even though they don’t have them. I don’t know.’ They are,” Kuntz said.
“We don’t know. We don’t have the answers.”
Similar scams are occurring in targeted locations in California.
Scammers altered the gift cards and put them on the shelf before they were discovered by an undercover operation.
Thousands of gift cards were tracked at more than 50 stores across the state.
This scam works by replacing the barcode on the gift card, so once the gift card is scanned and loaded with funds, the money is actually transferred to the scammer.
Walmart did not respond to US Sun’s request for comment at the time of publication.