Gift cards have caused quite a headache for retailers in the last month, exposing another way that fraudulent activity can eat into razor-thin profit margins. Gift card fraud can range from physical theft to cloning to exploiting programming errors on the merchant side.

The methods of attack are very similar to what is seen with credit card fraud, but gift card fraud is less widely reported in the news. The reason is that, unlike data breaches that involve credit cards, personally identifiable information (PII) is rarely disclosed. Regardless, it is important for both merchants and customers to know how gift card fraud occurs, so they can recognize the behavior and protect themselves.