For my non-Aussie friends, the ATO = Australian Taxation Office.
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Is this as big an issue in other countries?
Here in Australia when you buy a gift card through the self checkout, a warning pops up about scams that you have to click ok through. There's also messages that come over the in-store radio warning about not paying with gift cards too.
A few years ago in a town near me here in Canada, an old lady was trying to buy a bunch of gift cards from the local Staples outlet. The staff talked to her and realized she was getting scammed and tried to talk her out of it, but she refused to listen and got angry when they wouldn't sell her the cards. She left and went to a different store in town where the same thing happened. It took the local police to come down and talk to her before she realized she was close to losing a ton of money.
The annoying thing is they also get really insistent that it is a scam even when it's not. My grandma (an old lady) always buys a mountain of giftcards every year for christmas just because it's a big family and that makes for easy christmas gifts. Every year she has to argue with someone that, no she isn't getting scammed and they are actually for christmas gifts. You would think stores would be a little more lax on that around the holidays but aparently not.
Often this is part of the scam. Once the scammers have you convinced that they're official, they tell you to say it's for holidays or a birthday or something like that so you don't get stopped when buying gift cards.
Of course, this makes it really annoying to actually try to buy gift cards for gifts, because now when you defend yourself it sounds like you're getting scammed...
Being more lax during the holidays would just make scamming easier.
I mean, my local Colesworth doesn't really give a shit. I've seen people on the phone buying mass gift cards and had to step in because the staff just allow the purchases. I haven't heard a warning over the PA/in-store radio for years now. YMMV but it's still a problem around NW Sydney it seems.
The various scam phone calls that threaten jail time due to unpaid tax bills from the IRS (US) and CRA (Canada) is still thing.
It's humorous when the Chinese/Indian call centers where they originate from mix up the countries when threatening people with the RCMP is coming to arrest an American or the IRS is coming for a Canadian.
However we are expecting these boomers that copy and paste status updates limiting Facebook rights use of their account photos and info at midnight over and over again to navigate these scams on their own.
To be fair much of the customer support for large companies have been offloaded to India and the Philippines so that's one less barrier to overcome in triggering the BS detector of the not so savvy among us.
Oh sure, because we all read popups carefully. Nobody's spent decades getting trained to go "yeah yeah yeah fuck off" at every modal dialog, and all of them have convenient ways to scroll back and double-check what they said after you've sent them into the void.
In NZ it was definitely a think for a while, but I haven't heard anything about it in years now. Now even over the speakers in the aussie owned supermarket 🙂.