Black Friday Gift Scams

Black Friday cyber criminals have revamped gift card scams to better target modern online shoppers hungry for deals post-Thanksgiving. Experts warn new tactics include bogus gift card generators that install malware designed to sniff out a victim’s cryptocurrency wallet address.

Internet-based Black Friday and Cyber Monday scams have become as common as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. One novel twist includes offering gift cards for significantly less than face value as a ploy to entice users to buy stolen gift-cards or download malware.

Researchers said they have been tracking a number of websites that claim to provide “gift card generators” that people can use to generate the code for all kinds of gift cards. These sites can be particularly deceptive because they use major brands such as Amazon, Roblox, Google, Xbox and PS5.

People who fall victim to these scams will download gift card generators and be informed just before trying to use them that they don’t actually generate valid gift card codes, but only random codes for educational purposes and downloading malwares

One such scam that used a gift card generator to steal cryptocurrency from victims using a file titled “Amazon Gift Tool.exe” that was being marketed on a publicly available file repository site as a free Amazon gift card generator.

The scam depends on the victim not noticing that his or her crypto wallet address is on the clipboard when pasting it during the transaction, they noted. If successful, the transfer goes to the cyber criminal instead of the intended recipient.

To avoid falling prey to these and other cyber criminal scams on Black Friday this year, people have a few options. They can choose to be more creative in their choice of presents, keeping in mind that many gift cards end up going unspent.