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Steam will no longer offer physical gift cards
(pawb.social)
Kinda sucks for me, as I've almost exclusively used gift cards for the last few years. I get a bonus tax-free credit card by my employer, which I can only use at retail stores. So those were a great way for me to use that card to buy games. It was also a good option for people who wanted to avoid payment providers like Visa/Mastercard etc. Oh well.
What scams were those?
The main people impacted by this will be minors with no other way to buy anything from Steam…
Old people getting called/emailed, being convinced they owe either the government or the scammer money, and then bring told to go buy thousands in gift cards.
It's a big business. Over $200 million a year in the US.
We live with a guy who's been getting scammed for a while now. He just won't listen when we tell him. I highly doubt this change will affect him. They'll just go to a different type of gift card.
Sounds like getting rid of Steam gift cards won't solve that problem, they can do the same with other gift cards or even entirely different methods. Is that worth it to exclude minors or other people with no other way to pay?
This won't fix the problem, but it'll make it somebody else's.
They are not fighting scammers with this. It seems that they just do not desire to be caught in scammer business.
glorious cake day to you
This isn't the first time a company has canceled doing gift cards cause of this problem. It wouldn't even be weird to watch the entire concept of gift cards die off due to this problem.
Hell Iv seen major stores flat out stop selling gift cards. Or require really absurd shit like 3 day wait periods to buy them. To try to combat the issue.
Where I live, gift cards are still very widely available.
The fact that scamming people into buying fucking gift cards is a think just seems so odd to me.
It's a great way to launder the money, as the gift cards aren't tied to a person. Credit card and bank transactions can easily be tracked/reversed and crypto is too complicated to scam old people with.