The Federal Trade Commission has tied a sharp rise in scam losses to one simple tell: how a stranger says they must be paid. In its own data analysis, the FTC found that gift and reload cards grew from 7% of reported payment methods in 2015 to 26% in the first nine months of 2018, a 270% increase tied directly to scam reports. At the same time, the agency says nearly $245M has been reported lost on gift cards used to pay scammers since 2018, turning a seemingly harmless plastic card into one of the clearest early warning signs for consumers.
The stakes are immediate for anyone who gets a surprise demand to pay a debt, fee, or prize claim with a gift card, wire, cash reload card, or cryptocurrency. The FTC’s core message is blunt: the method a stranger insists on using is often the only clue a target receives before the money is gone for good.
Why The FTC says how a stranger asks matters now
The FTC’s warning about payment methods is rooted in a shift it documented in its own complaint data. In a detailed Data Spotlight, the agency reported that gift and reload cards rose from 7% of reported payment methods in 2015 to 26% between January and September 2018, a 270% increase in FTC direct reports tied to scams. That change in how scammers ask to be paid came before many victims realized that a gift card could function like cash once the numbers on the back are shared.
As the FTC has pushed out consumer alerts and videos, scammers have continued to favor payment rails that are fast, hard to reverse, and often anonymous. An FTC press release said its analysis of reports showed nearly $245M in spending on gift cards that ended up in scammers’ hands starting in 2018, and described gift cards as a favorite payment method in several scam categories, including government imposters and business imposters. That nearly $245M figure, drawn from the FTC’s own data analysis, shows why the agency now treats the way a stranger demands payment as a primary red flag, not a side detail.
The FTC has tried to translate that data into simple rules for the public. In a video asset titled “How Scammers Tell You To Pay,” the agency states that “If someone says you must wire money, or pay with a gift card or cash reload card, that’s a scam,” a line that appears in an official FTC media resource. The wording is categorical, and it turns what might sound like a quirky request into a clear diagnostic test for fraud.
The evidence behind The FTC says how a stranger asks
The clearest evidence that payment method gives a scam away comes from the FTC’s own data and consumer education materials. The agency’s Consumer Alert on gift card scams explains that its Data Spotlight analysis found scammers increasingly steering victims toward gift and reload cards, and that this analysis relied on FTC direct reports. The same alert explains that scammers prefer these cards because they can quickly turn the numbers on the back into cash-like value, with little chance of the victim getting the money back.
In its press release summarizing a gift card data analysis, the FTC reported that nearly $245M had been spent on gift cards that were then used to pay scammers starting in 2018, confirming that the shift seen in the 2015 to 2018 Data Spotlight translated into real losses. According to that FTC release, this nearly $245M in reported losses was tied to a range of scams, from callers pretending to be government agencies to fraudsters posing as businesses or romantic partners, all united by their insistence on payment with gift cards.
FTC guidance on fake check scams makes the same point in even sharper language. In its consumer advice on how to spot, avoid, and report fake checks, the FTC states, “Anyone who demands payment by gift card is always a scammer,” and lists gift cards, cryptocurrency, and wire transfers through services such as Western Union and MoneyGram as common payment rails that scammers push after sending a bogus check. That line appears in the agency’s fake check explainer, which is hosted on the FTC consumer site and ties the payment demand directly to the fraud itself.
The agency has also tried to show this pattern visually and in multiple languages. In a Consumer Alert titled “Video shows how scammers tell you to pay,” the FTC describes how scammers steer people to payment methods that make them hard to track and that are hard for victims to reverse, and points readers to a video that dramatizes these tactics. That alert, available through an FTC consumer page, connects the same payment rails highlighted in the Data Spotlight to everyday calls and texts that people receive.
What remains unresolved for The FTC says how a stranger asks
The FTC’s data and quotes leave some important questions open. The Data Spotlight on gift and reload cards covers the period from 2015 through January to September 2018, and the press release on nearly $245M in gift card losses refers to reports starting in 2018, but the latest publicly available update in these materials stops short of a current breakdown of payment methods. The FTC’s Explore Data hub points readers to Tableau Public dashboards labeled “Payment and Contact Methods” and “Subcategory Payment and Contact Methods,” but the specific figures in the structured claim table here do not include a more recent split between gift cards, cryptocurrency, and other methods, so there is insufficient data to determine how the mix has changed since the end of the period described in the Data Spotlight.
FTC alerts also acknowledge that scammers use cryptocurrency and money transfer services, and one Consumer Alert on rebuilding finances says crypto payments are typically irreversible and that money transfers are high risk, but the verified claims here do not include exact loss figures for those methods. That means there is insufficient data to determine whether losses tied to cryptocurrency have already overtaken gift cards or whether scammers are still relying more heavily on plastic cards as of the latest available figures.
Another gap is what happens after a victim pushes back. The FTC’s Consumer Alert on gift cards tells people to contact the card issuer or store immediately and to report fraud through the FTC’s complaint portal, and the How Scammers Tell You To Pay video links to tools such as reportfraud.ftc.gov, identitytheft.gov, takeitdown.ftc.gov, and donotcall.gov. However, the structured claims provided here do not include statistics on how often card issuers or stores manage to stop or reverse a fraudulent transaction, so there is insufficient data to determine the success rate of these interventions.
For readers, the practical takeaway is that the clearest, best supported rule is also the simplest one. The FTC’s own consumer advice says that “Anyone who demands payment by gift card is always a scammer,” and its video script states that if someone insists on a wire, gift card, or cash reload card, “that’s a scam.” With the latest detailed numbers on payment methods limited to the 2015 to early 2018 period and the aggregate gift card loss figure of nearly $245M since 2018, the next thing to watch is how those payment categories appear in the FTC’s Payment and Contact Methods dashboards and in future Data Spotlights. Until those new figures are published, the safest assumption, based on the FTC’s own wording and data, is that the way a stranger tells someone to pay remains one of the strongest and most immediate clues that a scam is underway.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
